Colour tattoo of a purple butterfly beside a teal flower with yellow stamens, green leaves and black swirling linework, on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple butterfly and teal flower tattoo

Botanical · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a purple butterfly with black-edged wings and white spots, positioned beside a teal-blue flower with yellow stamens and a red centre. Green leaves curve up from the flower, and black fine-line swirls and tendrils trail above and below the design. The colours are bold and fairly saturated against the surrounding skin, with soft shading on the wings and petals.

Botanical Butterfly Flower Leaves Swirl Tendril Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had counted the swallowtails twice before she admitted the buddleia was wrong. Her father's allotment ran along the cinder path behind the gasworks, and every August the lilac spikes drew half the county's butterflies. This year there was only one, a purple thing with black-edged wings that kept returning to the blue poppy beside the water butt, as if it had been sent to check on it.

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'It's a Meconopsis,' her father said from the far bed, not looking up. 'Himalayan. Your mother bought the seed from a man in Kendal who swore it would never take on clay.' He pressed a thumb into the soil by a bloom with yellow stamens and grunted. 'Took anyway.'

Nell knelt on the sacking and watched the butterfly open and close its wings like a slow hand. The stem curled under a leaf the colour of pond weed, and she thought about how long the bud had sat there for three weeks, pinched shut like a mouth that had decided against speaking. Her mother had talked to it every morning, a habit Nell had thought silly until last winter.

When the light went long and copper over the gasworks, her father crouched beside her and tipped the last packet into her palm. 'Scatter these along the fence,' he said. 'Let the tendrils run where they like.' She did. The butterfly followed her down the path, dipping over the rhubarb, and she let it go ahead of her, the way you let a thing find its own way to the gate.