Realistic butterfly tattoo with pale grey wings edged in orange and black spots, shaded to look three-dimensional on the top of a foot.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Realistic butterfly tattoo on a foot

Realism · Other · Mixed · Photo

A butterfly is tattooed on the top of a bare foot, with its wings angled outwards and spread across the instep. The wings use smooth grey and white shading with orange and yellow edging, and the body is drawn in fine detail, giving a lifelike, three-dimensional effect. The foot rests on a dark leather-look surface, with red nail polish on the toes providing a contrasting accent.

Realism Other Butterfly Foot Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fairground man left the cardboard box on the landing of Mrs Pell's boarding house with a note that said only, Keep it dry. Nell carried it up the three flights herself, because the girl who usually did the stairs had gone home to Ramsgate with a cough, and because she wanted to know what could need keeping dry in a town where the damp came off the sea and got into everything: the bread, the hymn books, the bones of the piano in the front room.

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Inside lay a butterfly made of tin and waxed silk. Its wings were the grey of wet pebbles, edged with the orange of a lamp seen through fog, and its body was a coil of brass wire no thicker than a hair. Mr Quick, the lodger who kept the pier's machinery running, had built it for the summer show. The wings were meant to lift on a spring whenever a penny dropped into the slot, and the man had clearly forgotten to collect it before the season ended.

Nell wound the spring with a hairpin and set the thing on the sill of her room. Each evening at dusk it trembled, tried the air with its wings, and sank back onto the wood as if it had thought better of the sea. She began to leave the sash open an inch so it might try again without the glass in the way. Mr Quick, when she mentioned it on the stairs, only tapped his nose and said the thing had been made to go out to the end of the pier and no further.

On the night of the gale the window banged wide and the room filled with spray. When Nell reached the sill it was empty. She found it at dawn, caught on the rail at the pier's end, its wings opening and closing in the first thin light as though it had simply been waiting for the weather to decide for it. She stood with her wet hands in her apron and watched it, and then she went back to the house and left the sash open all the same.