Black and grey butterfly tattoo with rose-filled wings on the side of a thigh, shown in dotwork and fine line shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly with floral wings on the thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A butterfly sits on the side of a thigh, with its upper wings filled with roses and foliage and its lower wings shaded in bands of fine lines. The work is in black and grey, with stippled dotwork texture and shading that gives the wings depth. The tattoo is centred in the frame, and the person's green top is visible at the top and left edges.

Dotwork Botanical Thigh Butterfly Rose Flower Foliage Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The road out of Sallow Wells ran dead straight for forty miles, and by the third summer of the drought the tar had gone soft enough to take a boot print. Ansel Dobb drove it every Thursday with a flatbed of salt-cured hides for the tannery at the coast. Every Thursday a grey-winged butterfly kept pace with his cab window, as if it had hitched a lift from somewhere further inland.

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He stopped once, at the cattle grid, because the butterfly settled on the dashboard and would not leave. Its upper wings were not wings at all but a close weave of roses, leaves and small bindweed flowers, packed so tight they looked as if they had been pricked into the paper with a needle. Its lower wings were banded like the ribs of a shell. His mother used to say butterflies were the souls of women who had walked out onto the flats and never come back. Ansel had never believed her, but he did not shake the thing off.

At the coast the tannery foreman counted the hides and asked who had given him a passenger. Ansel said nobody had. The foreman shrugged and said the gate had been open all week anyway, and that the yard had gone strange, with a bramble climbing the wall where no bramble had ever grown.

When Ansel walked in, the butterfly lifted from his sleeve and went to the gatepost. By morning the roses on its wings had opened in the salt-dry yard, one for every hide, and the foreman's wife stood among them with a bucket of water she had no use for.