Black and grey tattoo of a butterfly whose wings form skull faces with flower eyes, on the calf in Traditional style.

Skull and butterfly on a lower leg

Traditional · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of a butterfly whose wings are shaped as two skulls, each with a flower in the eye socket area. The shading is smooth and tonal, with bold outlines and lighter highlights on the skulls and flowers. The tattoo sits centrally on the lower leg against a plain pale background, with the skin tone and the edge of the ankle visible.

Traditional Calf Butterfly Skull Flower Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Papa's rule was simple: nothing crosses the bridge at Santa Inés without a stamp. So I stood at the yellow line with a shoebox on my knees, forty-one butterflies pinned in neat rows, while Officer Ruiz tapped his biro against the lid as though it might confess something.

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They were not ordinary butterflies. Each pair of wings was dusty brown and charcoal, and on every wing a skull grinned out from the pattern, its eye sockets filled with one pale flower. Papa had spent the last winter painting them onto the wings of the ones that fell in spring, though he always said he only traced what the hills gave him. Ruiz lifted the lid, looked for a long time, and asked what I was declaring. "Mariposas," I said. "Calaveras," he corrected, and I realised he had been to the same village festival every November, the one where his mother's name is read out with the others.

He held one up to the window. The skull's teeth caught the glare. "My mother used to say that in November the dead come back as butterflies, so they can find the road home without asking anyone the way," he said. "She said you should never trap one, only let it land on you." I told him Papa had not trapped anything. Every one of them had already finished its flying.

He stamped the form without reading the rest of it, slid the box back across the counter, and said the flowers were a good touch. I carried the shoebox over the bridge into the other country. When I looked down at the lid, a single marigold petal had stuck to the glass above the nearest skull, as if one of them had decided to come along.