Realistic colour tattoo of two pink and purple butterflies with green-dotted wing edges on the top of a foot.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two pink butterflies on the top of a foot

Realism · Other · Colour · Photo

Two butterflies with pink and purple wings edged in black and dotted with green and turquoise are tattooed across the top of a foot, one larger and one smaller. The wings are shaded to look three-dimensional, with soft highlights and dark outlines. The background is plain black, and the skin tones are natural.

Realism Other Butterfly Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third year of the crossing the air in the bay had thinned enough that Oyelaran Vance let you carry the release crate yourself. Inside, two butterflies sat on a folded square of mesh, their wings the colour of pressed rhubarb, edged in black and dotted with teal like the status lights along the pump deck. Nobody aboard the Halverson Reach had seen one fly outside the glass, and the manifest listed them under cargo that could not be replaced.

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You climbed the maintenance ladder to the high ring where the vents breathe, the basil and the sorrel rustling below you like a crowd that had been told to wait. Vance said the larger one would go first, because it had been bred from the older line and knew the route. The smaller one would follow its shadow. She tapped the log on the rail and reminded you that nothing leaves the bay without a count, and that the count is the only thing the ship has ever trusted.

The larger butterfly lifted off your palm and drifted over the herbs, then turned toward the vent where the warm air rose. The smaller one stayed on your wrist. You waited. Vance said to leave it, it would go when it was ready, and you realised she had been waiting for it too. When it finally opened its wings it did not follow the other toward the vent. It rose instead toward the observation hatch, where the stars hung in their cold rows, and settled on the glass with the dark behind it.

Vance asked what you would write in the log. You looked at the pencil in your hand for a long time. Then you wrote two, and she nodded, and neither of you mentioned the one that had chosen the window.