Purple botanical tattoo with a butterfly and flower buds on swirling black vines, running down the outer thigh.

Purple butterfly and flowers on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A butterfly and two flower buds sit on swirling black vines that run down the outer thigh. The linework is bold and black, with purple shading filling the wings, petals and curling tendrils. Purple ink dominates the composition against the pale skin, and the design sits in a diagonal flow from the upper thigh towards the knee.

Botanical Thigh Butterfly Flower Bud Vine Swirl Tendril

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The third bud on the iron trellis had not opened by the Tuesday, and Mrs Ackroyd said it would stay shut until somebody persuaded it across the wall. She meant the wall of the old kitchen garden at Penhallow, where the vine had climbed since her husband's time, its black stems knotted into scrolls that the frost could never get a grip on. Nobody in the village could say who had planted it. The cutting had come home in a sailor's tin, wrapped in wet newspaper, and the sailor had gone back to sea before anyone thought to ask his name.

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Tobias, who had mended the glasshouse panes for forty winters, said the trouble was simple enough. The buds were waiting on a butterfly, and the butterflies had all gone south with the swallows. So on the third night of the wrong wind he propped the back door open, lit a lantern, and sat on an upturned crate with his pipe unlit, watching the light draw moths in from the dark fields.

The purple one came at about two, its wings the colour of a bruised plum, edged with a thin black line like a schoolmaster's ruling. It walked the wall as if reading the vines, lifted, dropped onto the lowest flower and stayed there. Tobias did not move. By dawn the bud beside it had split a single petal, then another, the shadow of the wings still printed in the wet on the stone.

When Mrs Ackroyd came down with the post, the vine had reached the lower bloom and the butterfly was gone. She found a scrap of purple thread snagged on the iron, fine as a hair, and she kept it in her apron pocket for the rest of the summer.