Flash sheet of twelve watercolour-style butterfly designs in orange, blue, purple, green, yellow and pink, stacked vertically on a white background.

Stacked watercolour butterfly flash sheet

Colour · Flash

A tall flash sheet showing twelve butterflies stacked one above another, each in side or angled view with spread wings. The wings are painted in soft watercolour style with gradient washes, dark outlines and fine vein detail. Colours vary across the sheet, including blue, orange, yellow, green, purple and pink, on a plain white background.

Butterfly Wing Insect Flash sheet Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Harvest Moon fair pulled into Marsh Lane on a Tuesday, and by Thursday the caravan had no lettering left on its side that anyone could read. Dad blamed the damp. I think it was the summer sun, which had spent months on that flank of painted tin. He handed me a ladder, a tin of enamel and a sheet of flash he'd bought off a man in Blackpool, twelve butterflies stacked down the page like a ladder of their own, and told me to copy them up the panel before the gate opened.

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I got through five. The orange one with the black-tipped wings came easily, and so did the blue with the scalloped edge, but the yellow pair took me all Wednesday night with a torch in my teeth. Each time I climbed down to check, the fair seemed a little bigger: a new stall, a toffee apple man with a cart and no horse, a carousel that hadn't been there at teatime. Nobody asked what I was doing. Mum brought tea at ten and said the butterflies looked like they were trying to leave.

On the Friday a girl of about nine stood at the foot of the ladder with a paper bag of pear drops and asked which one was the real one. I said they were all real, they were just painted. She shook her head and pointed at the faded pink one near the bottom, the one I'd got wrong, its wings dusted lighter than the rest. 'That one's going home,' she said. I laughed, then looked down and saw the same pink on my own fingers.

We packed up on Sunday. The gate was padlocked and the van rolled out past the chip shop, and when I looked back from the lane the panel caught the low sun and every wing seemed to draw a breath. The pink one had lifted a fraction off the tin, as if I'd painted it mid-flight. I've never told Dad. He still calls it the Carpet van.