Colour tattoo of a monarch butterfly with orange, yellow and blue watercolour splashes on a lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Monarch butterfly with watercolour splashes

Calf · Colour · Photo

A large monarch butterfly with black-outlined wings, white spots and a dark body sits at the centre of the design. Its wings are shaded with yellow and orange, and loose watercolour-style splashes in red, orange, yellow and blue spread around it. The butterfly is shown straight on against pale skin, with the splashes filling the space around its wings.

Calf Butterfly Monarch butterfly Watercolour splash Paint splatter Wing Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tin came into the lost property office on a Tuesday, wedged under a bench on platform four, and I logged it the way I logged everything: item, location, time found. Twelve half-pans of watercolour, most worn to a sliver, and a brush with its ferrule bent flat. Nobody claimed it. Nobody claimed anything from platform four, which was why I liked working there.

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I opened it on my lunch break with a flask of tea going cold beside me. Tucked under the lid was a sheet of cartridge paper, and on it a monarch, painted straight on, its wings outlined in black and filled with yellow that bled into orange wherever the water had been heavy. Round it, flicks of red and blue, as if the colour had been shaken off a brush held over the page by someone impatient or happy. Along the bottom edge, in careful pencil capitals: FOR WHEN THE TRAINS STOP.

I asked around. Mrs Okafor at the buffet said an old woman had sat on that bench every Thursday for years, sketching the departures and never once boarding. The newsagent thought her name was Vera and that she'd gone up north to be near a son. Nobody knew why she'd left the tin behind, or whether she'd known she was leaving it.

On the Thursday, I sat on her bench with the tin on my knee. The eleven-forty to Leeds pulled in, doors opened, nobody got off, and then a real monarch came drifting across the platform above the rails, lifted by the wash of the engine. I watched it climb past the glass roof into the light. On the form, under reason for collection, I wrote: gone the same way as she did. Then I left the tin open on the bench, so the paint could dry in the sun.