Fine line black outline butterfly tattoo on the outer side of a bare foot, with bright orange toenail polish.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small butterfly tattoo on a foot

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

Two bare feet stand on a light tiled floor, with orange polish on all the toenails. A small butterfly with simple black outlines sits on the outer side of the right foot, with its wings open. The linework is thin and unshaded, and the warm orange nails are the strongest colour in the frame.

Fine line Other Butterfly Foot Toenails Nail polish

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gatehouse tiles were still warm when the surveyor's boy came running up the bank, shouting that the old ledger had turned up under the chapel step. I didn't stop sweeping. Eighty years of wind had laid a grey crust over the flags, and I'd given up hoping for the colour underneath, so when a butterfly came down onto the threshold I took it for a leaf someone had dropped.

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It was black-winged and outlined in ink like a schoolboy's drawing, and it walked rather than flew, opening and closing its wings on the stone as if counting something. Mr Fenwick from the trust said the old families used to keep a lamp lit in that doorway for a girl called Isobel Carrick, who went through the ice on the mere the winter the roof fell in. He told it the way men tell things they don't quite believe.

I found the ledger that afternoon, pressed flat between two mortar-stained slabs. On the inside cover someone had sketched a butterfly in brown ink and written beside it in careful copperplate: Thy wings come home when the marigolds turn. The marigolds by the gatehouse had gone orange that week, bright as a cut. I copied the line onto a card and left it under the lamp.

Next morning the butterfly was gone, but the card had been moved to the middle of the doorway and squared to the crack in the stone, and the flagstone beneath it had been swept clean in a perfect circle.