Black-outlined geometric butterfly with soft yellow, blue and pink watercolour washes on the top of a foot, with green painted toenails.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric butterfly on a foot

Geometric · Other · Mixed · Photo

A geometric butterfly is drawn in thin black outline across the top of a foot, with its wings made of straight angled lines. Loose, bleeding washes of yellow, blue, pink and red fill parts of the wings and spread beyond the outline. The foot rests on a pale blue surface, with the toes and green nail polish visible at the left of the frame.

Geometric Other Butterfly Outline Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chart table on the Marguerite was never quite level, so the dividers rolled, and that was the first thing Tomasz taught me about folding paper at sea. He kept a cabin under the bridge and a box of old Admiralty charts he'd been given in Valparaíso, and he folded them into butterflies with the sharp creases of a man who had measured everything twice.

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I asked him why he never made them with curves. He said the sea didn't do curves, it did angles, and a butterfly was only a promise made of straight lines that the wind would finish. He dipped a brush in the paint tins the carpenter left behind, yellow from the lamp oil, blue from the ultramarine, and let the colour bleed past the edges where the folds ran out. 'Keep the lines hard,' he said, 'and let the colour wander. That's how you get something that flies.'

Off the Horn we caught a squall, and the galley table went over with a crash, sending the folds skating across the saloon. Some of them slid into the bilge water and came up soft, their washes running pink and red into the paper. Tomasz laughed until he coughed. I kept one, the one with yellow spreading over its left wing like sunrise through fog.

When we raised the Falklands he was gone, buried at sea in a canvas sack, and I found the chart box under his bunk. I still have that butterfly. Its outline is as sharp as the day he drew it, and the colours have kept on wandering, just as he said they would.