Three grey lace-patterned butterflies with watercolour splashes in pink, teal and blue, tattooed across a person's lower back.

Lace-winged butterflies with watercolour splashes

Back · Mixed · Photo

Three butterflies with ornate lace-like wing patterns sit in a loose diagonal across the lower back. The wings are drawn in fine grey-black linework and shading, with the lace detail filled in as dense small motifs. Soft watercolour splashes in pink, teal, green and blue surround the butterflies and fade into the surrounding skin, which is shown under a paper covering.

Back Butterfly Lace Watercolour Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain came to Harrow Wells only once or twice in a good year, and when it did the butterflies came up out of the cracked ground to drink. Nobody had ever seen where they slept. Ruth Tallow, who kept the petrol station on the Ninety Mile road, said they were the grey lace of a bridal veil left out too long in the wind, loosened and given wings. She sold cold tea to the drivers and told them this for nothing.

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One April a boy called Dell Ferris walked out from the highway with a jam jar and no water, because his sister had gone to the coast and had not written, and he meant to catch a butterfly to send her as a sign that the desert was still there. He found three in a dip where the puddle had gone blue from the runoff off the hills, and pink where the clay had let go its colour. Their wings opened and closed slowly, the lace worked so fine he could see the sky through the holes.

He did not close the jar. He sat on a warm stone and watched them until the sun slid low, and by then he understood they were not drinking so much as carrying the water away in their wings, one colour at a time, to wherever the rain would be next. He walked home with the jar empty and his hands clean.

A letter came from the coast in June with a smudge of teal on the corner. Folded inside was a single grey wing, lace so fine it held the light, and no word at all.