Colour tattoo of a spotted fawn looking back over its shoulder, with a yellow and blue butterfly perched above it, on the lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fawn and butterfly on a lower leg

Calf · Colour · Photo

A young deer fawn with white spots stands in profile, turning its head back towards the viewer, and a butterfly rests on a pale, flowing stem above its back. The linework is soft and the fur is shaded in browns and tans with white highlights, giving the figure a gentle, illustrative look. The butterfly has yellow, orange and blue-green wings, and the composition runs diagonally up the leg.

Calf Fawn Deer Butterfly Spots Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fawn is standing in the white gravel at the edge of the road when you come round the bend, and for a second you think it is a stone, a bleached thing the heat has put there. Then it turns its head, slow as a question, and looks back at you over its shoulder with eyes too large for the rest of it. Your foot finds the brake without asking you first. The truck settles on its springs. Dust overtakes you and rolls on past the bonnet.

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Nothing about the animal is hurrying. Its legs are long and knobbled at the knee, thin as the mesquite poles that mark the old fence line, and its coat is the colour of the dry creek bed behind it, dappled with pale spots like sun coming through a canopy that isn't there. On its back a butterfly sits on a trail of pale grass that has no business growing in this country. The wings are yellow going to orange at the tips, with a stripe of green-blue where the light hits. Neither of them seems bothered by the engine ticking as it cools.

You wait. Your aunt used to say that desert animals test you before they let you pass, the way the road tests a tyre. You sit with the window down and count your breaths, eleven, twelve, and somewhere past twenty the fawn lifts one forefoot, very carefully, and sets it down on the far side of the road, where the tarmac gives way to sand. The butterfly does not move. It simply goes along with the animal, the way a passenger does.

When the fawn has gone into the scrub, the grass stem leaves a faint pale line in the dust, and you follow it with your eyes until the heat shakes it loose. Then you put the truck into gear and drive on, slower than you need to, watching the shoulders for the next thing that has decided to cross.