Black lace-patterned butterfly tattoo with dotted chain drops on the inside of an ankle, against a blue background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lace butterfly with dangling drops on an ankle

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A butterfly with wings filled with lace-like openwork patterns sits on the ankle, with a small curled antenna pair at the top. Below the wings, a dotted chain hangs in a shallow curve and ends in three teardrop shapes. The tattoo is done in solid black ink with fine and bold linework and no shading, and sits centrally on the skin against a blue backdrop.

Ankle Butterfly Lace Dotted chain Drop Antennae

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have the pins in your mouth and the pillow balanced on your knee, and the bobbins clack like a slow clock while the afternoon light lies across the lawn. Your grandmother's garden is going to seed beyond the window. The buddleia has been full of butterflies all week, and you have not yet found a pattern that would hold one.

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On Thursday you tried drawing one with a pencil. It came out stiff, a shape pinned to paper. So you go out in your slippers to the buddleia and watch a peacock settle on a purple head, its wings closing and opening like a book somebody cannot quite finish reading. Then you notice the wings have holes in them, sunlight coming through the gaps, and the veins are a net of fine threads. You crouch with your knees cracking and count the threads until your eyes water.

Back at the cushion you set the pins in a new arc. The wings take three evenings. You work the mesh first, then the scalloped rims that curl like the edge of a doily left out in the rain, and last the antennae, two curls you make by winding thread around a darning needle. For the drops you think of the dew that gathers on the bottom rail of the gate each morning, heavy and ready to fall, and you cannot make them drop the way they should, so you let them hang in a shallow swag, three beads at the end.

On the fourth evening the lace is done. You lift it off the pillow and hold it against the window, and the light comes through the wings. Out in the garden something moves in the buddleia, pale and quick. You do not put the lace down. You go to the back door and open it wide, and you let the real one go first.