Black and grey fine line butterflies tattooed on a woman's ankle and the top of her foot, with her lying on white bedding.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three butterflies on an ankle

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of a bare foot and ankle with four small butterflies in black ink, three on the top of the foot and one higher on the ankle, each with shaded wings. The linework is delicate and the wings are filled with grey tones. The soft white bedding and warm skin tones form the background, and a ring is visible on one toe.

Ankle Butterfly Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm told me the butterflies came in through the scriptorium window every June because the lavender had been planted against the wall for them, and that I was to stop swatting at them with my pen hand. I was nineteen and had been sent up from the kitchens because my letters were neat. Neat, he said, was not the same as patient.

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For a month I painted them into the margins of the psalter, one at a time, the way the old books did with saints and dragons. Four to a page at most. He made me mix the grey from lamp soot and gum arabic and told me to leave the wings unfinished where the light would fall, so the vellum showed through. My first attempt looked like moths that had been stepped on. The second looked like nothing at all. The third, he said, would do, if I stopped trying to make it true.

On the feast of Saint Brendan the abbot came to see the book and stopped at a leaf where one butterfly had settled on the edge of the Te Deum. He asked whose it was. I said mine. Anselm said nothing, only pressed a finger to the paint and lifted it away dry. Then the abbot laughed, which I had never heard him do, and turned the page to find the rest.