Colourful cartoon-style butterflies with flower and polka dot patterns, plus stars, hearts and swirls, on the outer lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Colourful butterflies with stars and hearts on a leg

Calf · Colour · Photo

Three butterflies with patterned wings of flowers, stripes and polka dots sit alongside a small star, a heart and curled swirl marks. The outlines are simple and bold, with the wings filled in with bright, flat colour. The motifs are scattered loosely across the lower leg against a dark background.

Calf Butterfly Flower Star Heart Swirl Polka dot Stripe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every morning the 6.12 to Carrowby came in with butterflies riding on its roof, and every morning old Tobias Greave swept them off the platform with his broom and told them the line was closed. They never listened. They came in flocks of patterned wings, striped and speckled and bright as sweet paper, and they settled on the signal wires as if the wires were flowers.

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Nobody remembered where they had come from. The stationmaster's wife said they were the ghosts of brides who had missed their trains, and Tobias said that was nonsense, brides didn't come back for butterflies. But when the rain flooded the lower meadow that spring, the butterflies went with the water and did not return for a fortnight. The platform was grey and quiet, and Tobias found he couldn't sleep for the silence.

On the fifteenth day a girl came off the late train with a cardboard suitcase and a paper bag of seeds. She knelt by the bench and began scattering them between the sleepers, humming. "Mother says you need flowers before you can have butterflies," she said, not looking up. Tobias told her there was no soil between the rails. She said there was enough, if you were patient.

By the end of summer the sleepers had clover in them, then poppies, then a stripe of marigold along the edge of the down platform. The butterflies came back on the first warm morning, circling the signal wires, and Tobias stood with his broom and didn't sweep at all. He said only, "Mind the 6.12," and they minded it.