Black tribal butterfly tattoo with swirling patterns and small blue dots, on the top of a foot, in blackwork style.

Tribal butterfly on the foot

Blackwork · Other · Mixed · Photo

A solid black tribal-style butterfly with scrolling spirals and leaf-like ornaments fills most of the frame, with its wings sweeping up and outward across the top of a foot. Small blue dots sit near the head and antennae, and the thin lines of the antennae curve away from the body. The photograph is taken straight on at close range, with the skin tone and the tattoo's edges clearly visible.

Blackwork Other Butterfly Tribal Swirl Scroll Spiral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mags came up the orchard lane with her apron full of windfalls, though the wardens had already rung the bell for the gate. The wasps were drunk on the spilt juice under the old Ellis trees, and the late sun lay flat across the rows so every trunk threw a long shadow onto the grass.

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Her grandmother had always said the orchard was older than the parish, and that the black butterflies that rose from the hedgerow in August were the orchard's own, sent to count the fruit. Mags had never believed it. She set the windfalls on the stone wall and watched one land on the cuff of her sleeve, its wings as dark and stitched as ironwork, the curls at their edges tight as fern heads.

Her brother Tom laughed when she said she would give the butterfly her last blue bead. He said a butterfly wanted nectar, not glass. But the bead had been the one the tinker gave her mother, and she pressed it to the wall beside the wings, two small blue eyes, and the butterfly lifted slowly and drifted along the row toward the crooked pear tree.

Next morning the pears had been picked clean, every one, and nobody could say who had taken them. Mags walked out with her apron empty and found the bead sitting on the wall where she had left it, with a single curl of black dust beside it, as if something had been counting and had decided she was owed.