Three purple butterflies in a realistic style sit on the back of a hand, with a smiling woman's lips and chin visible at the top of the frame.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three purple butterflies on a hand

Realism · Hand · Colour · Photo

Three purple butterflies with dark-tipped wings are arranged in a diagonal line across the back of a hand. The wings show soft shading and highlights that give them a dimensional, almost three-dimensional look against the skin. The vivid violet ink dominates the image, set against a dark blue denim background and a close crop of the woman's face.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dora never painted anything she couldn't hold up to the light first. Her father had taught her that in the sign shed behind the Dreamland arcade in Margate, where the paint came in tins labelled with the names of dyes nobody made any more. The violet was the difficult one. Every batch came out either bruise or lilac, and she mixed it three times before the morning the commission arrived.

Keep reading

The client wanted three butterflies for the side wall of a hairdresser's on the front, wings lifted as if they'd only just landed. She drew them on card first, shading the lower wings darker so they seemed to stand off the board. Her father would have called that showing off. She called it honesty. A flat butterfly is a lie about how far a thing can fly.

The hairdresser's owner, a widow called Mrs Adair, came down on the last Thursday of August to watch them go up. She stood a long while in the drizzle with one hand on the wet brick and said nothing. Then she asked Dora to paint a fourth, small, in the corner by the drainpipe, so that it could only be seen by someone who knew to look.

Dora did. It took twenty minutes, and when she climbed down, the shadow of its wing lay across the gutter like a dropped glove. Nobody noticed it except the gulls, who kept landing on it, and the sign outlasted the shop by nine years.

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