Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two butterflies on the top of a foot

Realism · Other · Mixed · Photo

A photograph of the top of a foot with two butterfly tattoos, one purple and one orange with black wing edges and white spots. The wings are shaded to appear three-dimensional, with soft cast shadows beneath each butterfly. The smaller purple butterfly sits above and to the right of the larger orange one, and the background is a pale grey fabric.

Realism Other Butterfly Monarch butterfly

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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 lift has been broken since Tuesday, so you take the stairs with the bag of bleach and a tin of yellow gloss, counting landings the way your nan counted rosary beads. Eleven floors. By the sixth the stairwell smells of someone's Sunday roast and cold concrete. Nobody on the estate has painted anything brighter than the bin sheds in years, and the council said the balconies were a fire risk, so you are doing this quietly.

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On the eleventh floor the wind comes straight off the car park and through the railings. You find the butterfly already there, pinned against the grey render of the flat next door. It is orange, the colour of a monarch on a buddleia, and it has not moved since morning. Someone has tried to cover it with a scrap of cardboard and masking tape. You peel the tape away. Underneath, the wings still carry a dull wet shine, and a smaller purple one has settled beside it, as if it followed the first all the way up eleven floors and decided to stay.

You stand there with the tin in one hand and the brush in the other, and you realise the wall has been waiting for someone to notice it. You dip the brush. The first stroke goes on too thick, so you let it run, and the orange spreads into the cracks of the render like a map being drawn from the inside. When you look up, the flats across the car park have their lights on, the wind has dropped, and both wings are lifting very slowly towards the sky.