Five solid black butterfly silhouettes in a row across the top of a foot, with red toenail polish and denim at the ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Five butterflies across the foot

Blackwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a foot resting on a white surface, with five solid black butterfly silhouettes in a diagonal row across the top of the foot. The butterflies vary in size, with the smallest near the toes and the largest near the ankle, and are rendered as flat black fills with no shading. The image is entirely black ink on skin, with the red toenails and blue denim providing the only other colour.

Blackwork Other Butterfly Silhouette Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift at Harrow Point had been out since Tuesday, so Nadia climbed the stairs with a carrier bag of shopping cutting into her fingers, counting landings the way other people counted sheep. On the eleventh floor the window by the bin chute had a crack that let in the evening, and something small had settled on the sill, black and flat as a cut-out. She stopped to look. It did not move.

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Her mum had a rule about things that landed on the sill: you named them after whoever you missed most, then you let them go. Nadia had never once followed it. She was on the twelfth landing before she thought of Gran, who had moved to Margate in March with a suitcase and a fern that did not survive the train. A second shape, a little bigger, was resting on the handrail. Then a third, a fourth, each one larger than the last, climbing the stairwell wall like someone who had decided to go up and see what was there.

At the top, where the roof door had been wedged open with a fire extinguisher for a month, the largest of them waited on the frame, its wings the width of a hand held flat. Nadia set down the shopping, found Gran's last voicemail, the one complaining that the sea was too cold to walk into, and held the phone up to the wall like a lamp. The estate spread below her like dropped change.

She counted five, then counted again, and the number held. She left the roof door propped and went down slowly, one flight at a time. At the bottom she found the smallest one already on her sleeve, and she let it stay there all the way up to her flat.