Colour realism tattoo of a butterfly with black, tan, blue-grey and yellow wings on the outer thigh, with denim shorts visible at the edge of the frame.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Realistic butterfly on the thigh

Realism · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A large butterfly with outspread wings and thin red-tipped antennae is tattooed on the outer thigh. The wings have bold black edging, shaded tan and gold panels, and pale blue-grey sections with yellow markings, while the body is shaded brown and segmented. The butterfly is centred on the skin with denim shorts visible at the left and top of the frame.

Realism Thigh Butterfly Wing Antennae Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The glasshouse door sticks in the damp, so you lift it by the brass handle the way your uncle showed you before he went north. Inside, the heat settles on your face like a warm flannel. The birdwing has been circling the fig tree since breakfast, and each time it dips, the gold panels on its hindwings catch the light the colour of old pennies.

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"Don't touch it," says Aunt Mabel from the potting bench, without looking up. "They lose the dust off their wings if you grab them, and then they can't fly straight." You push your hands into your pockets. On the bench, beside the seed trays, lies a letter from the museum in Bristol saying the cabinet at the end of the pier is being emptied, and the specimens are going to a school that has asked for them. Mabel has folded it into quarters and pressed it flat under a pot of basil, as though the basil might keep it from leaving.

The butterfly lands on the red-tipped stalk of a runner bean flower and folds its wings, and for a moment you can count the yellow dashes along the black edging. Nine on one side, eight on the other, because one has been chipped since the crate came in from Sarawak. You have counted them four times. Mabel says the number changes if you are sad, and you tell her that is nonsense, and she laughs and says it is only nonsense until you try it.

When she turns to the kettle, you reach past the bean canes and push the top vent open. The warm air rushes out, the butterfly rises past the gutter, and for a while it is only a flicker of blue-grey over the greenhouse roof. By the time Mabel looks round, there is nothing in the garden but the stripe of sun across the bench and the fig leaves, and she is smiling at the empty sky as if she had planned it all along.