Black scrollwork and a butterfly-style motif with pink outlines and pink dots, running from the ankle up the calf and onto the top of the foot.

Scrollwork and butterfly ankle tattoo

Neo-trad · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A leg and foot with black scrollwork vines and a stylised butterfly-like motif that runs from the ankle up the lower leg and onto the top of the foot. The thick black linework has a pink outline, and the wings are shaded with fine stippled dots that fade outwards. Black ink dominates, with bright pink accents on the outlines and the centre spots, set against plain skin and a dark chair.

Neo-trad Dotwork Ankle Calf Scrollwork Swirl Butterfly Dot Vine Flourish Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, Bernie, the urn's still warm and nobody's making you do the conga. You all remember the vines on the chapel wall in Thornley? Black as a boot and ringed round in pink, like somebody had gone over them with lipstick. Nell Ambrose did them the summer we were fourteen, with a sable brush she'd nicked from her uncle's sign-writing van, and she swore a butterfly came to watch her every evening at dusk.

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It was no ordinary butterfly. Its wings had eyes in them, dark and round, with pink at the centre, and when the light went it would settle on the mortar and blink at her. Nell said it wanted the wall finished. Mr Fairweather, who ran the parish like a tight ship, said the wall had been bare since the Armada and would stay bare. So the vines kept growing, one scroll a night, down past the lych gate and out across the lane, until the milk float couldn't get through.

Then in October the chapel was locked. Fairweather kept the key on a string round his neck and swore the butterfly was a trick of the lamp. Nell went up the bell tower the night before the hearing, and the whole village heard her talking, though nobody could say to what. Next morning the vines had drawn back into the stone, every scroll, leaving one curl above the door, and the butterfly was gone, though its pink dots stayed on the bricks.

I've never known what she said up there. Nell moved to Leeds and never painted again. But if you stand where the lych gate used to be, at dusk, you can still see that last curl catch the light. Mind how you go, Bernie. Something up there is keeping count.