Black ink and watercolour drawing of a butterfly whose wings and body are formed from pink flowers and leaves on a peach background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly made of pink blossom

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

A butterfly is drawn with black ink outlines and dotted wing markings, with its wings and body built from pink blossoms, buds, leaves and branches. Pink and peach watercolour washes fill the flowers, with touches of green on the leaves. The design is centred on a plain peach background, with the butterfly's left wing and the flower cluster on its right balanced either side of a central stem.

Botanical Butterfly Flower Blossom Leaves Branches Bud Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit by the window, love, the draught won't reach you there. That was the rule at Gull House for forty years, and it began with the painter. He came up from the station the spring the orchard blew, a thin man with ink on his cuffs and a sketchbook the maid was not allowed to touch. He paid a week in advance and asked only for a jug of water and the window open, so the blossom could drift in off the cherry trees behind the chapel wall.

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Each morning he took his board down to the harbour wall and came back at teatime with his fingers stained apricot. I looked at his pages when he was out, the way you do. Wings, dozens of them, black lines like lead came in a chapel window, and inside them pink washes bleeding into each other, with petals where the scales should be. A butterfly that had been out in the orchard too long, he said, and forgotten it was meant to fly.

On his last night the wind came round to the south and rattled every shutter on the front. By morning the room was empty, the bed made tight as a drum, and the sketchbook gone from the sill. In its place lay a scatter of salt-wet blossom, and pinned to my kitchen door was one page he had left behind. A butterfly with a single bare branch for a body, and beneath it, in a careful hand: Pay the rest to the orchard.

The chapel wall came down that winter, and the cherry trees with it. Nobody planted new ones. But the spring after, the lane boys swore a pink shape had settled on the low branch by the gate and would not be shooed. I never saw it myself. I only ever kept the window open and sat the lodgers where the draught can't reach.