Enlarged with AI from a smaller original
Lighthouse and butterfly on a thigh
Thigh · Colour · Photo
A lighthouse with a black-lined tower sits on the left, with a butterfly on the right. Soft washes of blue, pink, green and purple spread behind and through the lighthouse, with a few dark splatters. The tattoo wraps around the outer thigh and hip, with the thin outlines contrasting against the loose colour fills.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
For three nights the fog sat on the sound between the two countries, and Hanne Mercer kept the ledger open on the customs hut sill, writing nothing. The lighthouse on Scarrow Rock was the only thing she could make out past the mudflats, its black-lined tower fading into the grey like a pen stroke someone had started and abandoned.
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On the fourth morning a young man came across the flats on foot, carrying a canvas roll under one arm and a damp cardboard box with holes punched in the lid. He had no papers for the box. "It's a butterfly," he said, before she asked. "A painted lady. They came in on the wind and got caught in my tent." Hanne looked at the box, then at the roll. He unrolled it on the bonnet of her jeep: a wash of blue sky, a pink sea, and a lighthouse painted so loosely that its stripes bled into the water.
"You're not a painter," she said. "No. I drew the border for the treaty office, and they told me to keep the lines sharp. This is what the coast looked like before the lines." He lifted the lid. The butterfly rose, its wings catching the lamp's last sweep, and climbed straight up into the fog towards the light.
Hanne stamped nothing. She wrote in the ledger: one crossing, no goods, one light visible. Then she shut the book and let the wind lift the corner of the page until the ink ran pale.
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