Two matching traditional tattoos on the thighs, each showing a black and grey butterfly above a flower with red accents and dripping drops.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching butterfly and flower thigh tattoos

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

The photograph shows the outer thighs of one person, each with a near mirror image design: a large black and grey butterfly on the upper thigh and a flower with dark leaves and drip-shaped drops below it, closer to the knee. The butterflies use bold black outlines with grey shading and fine dotted texture on the wings, while the flowers have solid black leaves and red accents in their centres. The composition is angled from above, with the two legs framed side by side and a hand and white fabric at the top of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The drawings were pinned above the chart table in the Marigold Rose long before anyone thought to ask who had made them. Ada Penrose had done them on the back of a tide table: two butterflies with wings like furled umbrellas, and beneath each one a flower with leaves as black as tar and drops falling from its petals like seawater running off a net. Dad said they were for luck. Mum said they were for showing off.

Keep reading

Ada drew them the winter the Marigold lost her second engine and half the fleet sat idle in Newlyn. She worked at the net loft under a paraffin lamp with a pot of Indian ink, and she made each design a mirror of the other so nobody could say which was the true one. "Left wing's the sea," she said, "right wing's the weather." I told her that was nonsense. She laughed and blotted the second drawing with her thumb.

In March a moth came aboard off Padstow, dusty and half dead, and it walked the length of the wheelhouse rail as if the boat belonged to it. We let it be. When we hauled on the Thursday, the drops on the flowers had gone rusty in the damp, and the dots on the wings looked like someone had flicked salt across them. Dad took the drawings down and pinned them back up the wrong way round, so the flowers hung over the sea.

We never found Ada's sketchbook, and the boat came home every night with the same modest catch. But when the wind backs round to the west I still catch myself looking up at those two black wings, waiting for them to lift off the tide table and go.

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