Watercolour style tattoo on a thigh showing blue and orange butterflies, an open pocket watch with Roman numerals and soft splashes of purple and orange.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour butterflies and pocket watch on thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

The design combines two butterflies, one blue and one orange, with an open pocket watch showing Roman numerals and hands. The butterflies and watch sit over loose, bleeding washes of blue, purple and orange that suggest watercolour painting. The linework on the watch is fine and defined, while the colour is soft and feathered across the thigh.

Thigh Butterfly Pocket watch Clock Roman numeral Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every morning the old gardener at Hollin Court wound the silver pocket watch he kept in his waistcoat and hung it from the sundial, because the sundial had drifted since his grandfather's day and somebody had to keep the hours honest. The walled garden had gone to seed around him. Foxgloves pushed up through the gravel and the glasshouse panes were green with weather. Only the butterflies still kept to a timetable, arriving at the buddleia at ten and leaving when the church bells in the village rang noon.

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One July a girl came up the lane with a paint box and a borrowed sketchbook and asked if she might draw the wall. He said she could have the wall if she kept off the rhubarb. She worked with a tin of water and a brush gone soft at the tip, and the colours ran where she wanted them to: blue into lilac, orange bleeding into the brown of old brick. When she showed him the page, the butterflies looked as if they might lift off the paper if the paper were only damp enough.

On the last afternoon of August she gave him a scrap of card with a clock face painted on it, the Roman numerals a little crooked, the hands stopped at a quarter to one. He asked why it had stopped. She said a garden only stays as it is while the hour is held, and that he should open his own watch on the first frost and see what was left. Then she walked back down the lane and did not return.

That autumn the frost came early. He opened the watch on the sundial, and a blue butterfly and an orange one came down from the buddleia, though it was November, and settled on the open lid as if they had been painted there. He did not wind the watch that morning. For the first time in forty years, the hours at Hollin Court were allowed to run on their own.