Colour tattoo of a purple and pink butterfly with yellow and teal stars on the top of a foot, with black dots and pink toenail polish visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Colourful butterfly and stars on a foot

Other · Colour · Photo

A butterfly-like design with purple, pink and green wings and a pink central ribbon shape sits on the top of a foot, surrounded by yellow, orange and teal stars and small black dots. The forms use bold dark outlines with soft, blended colour fills and light splashes of wash-like tint behind the wings. The tattoo fills the centre of the frame against a pale wooden floor, with pink-painted toenails visible at the bottom.

Other Butterfly Ribbon Star Dot Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm has given you the margin of the Psalm 90 page and one instruction: the butterfly must not look like a moth. For three mornings you have worked with a squirrel-hair brush, mixing ultramarine with a little lead white until the wings seem to breathe. The ribbon that loops through them is the pink of the cheap ink your mother once used to write letters home, and you have chosen it on purpose, though Anselm pretends not to notice.

Keep reading

The bell for Sext rings across the orchard and the brothers file out in their grey wool, leaving the scriptorium to the smell of size and the tick of the cooling stove. You stay with the gold. When the wash water has gone cloudy you add the stars, ochre and orange and a teal you ground from verdigris the abbot forbids in the choir. Last come the black dots, flicked from a quill with your thumb, scattering like soot off a lamp wick.

Anselm comes back before you expect him and stands behind your stool for a long while without speaking. Then he takes the loose ribbon of silk from the sill, lays it along the vellum so the pink runs straight into the butterfly's body, and sets the psalter closed on top of it. He tells you the abbot will open this book every night until his eyes give out, and the page will fall open to the same place, to the wings and the stars.

You do not ask whether he means it kindly. The ink is still tacky, so you lift the book by its edges and carry it to the window, where the afternoon light comes through the parchment and makes the teal glow like something alive underneath.