Painted tattoo design of black butterfly silhouettes over purple, pink and blue watercolour splashes, drawn on pale paper.

Watercolour butterflies in black and purple

Mixed · Flash

The image shows a group of black butterfly silhouettes flying diagonally across the page, with the largest at upper right and smaller ones trailing down to the lower left. Behind and around them are loose watercolour washes in violet, magenta, pink and blue, with dark ink specks and drips scattered through the composition. The linework is absent; the butterflies are solid black shapes, and the colour runs softly into the paper, giving a splattered, painterly finish.

Butterfly Watercolour Splatter Silhouette Ink

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallowtails had gone by the first week of August, Dad said, so when the black ones came up off the damson rows that September, nobody believed me. I was twelve and carried a jam jar of wasps up the lane to prove I wasn't making things up. Mum stopped at the gate with the trug on her hip and watched them go over the wall, and said butterflies didn't travel in flocks like starlings, and then didn't say anything else.

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They rose from the windfalls in the Bramley row, a dozen, then thirty, dark as cut paper against the sky. Where they crossed the low sun the light turned violet and rose, as if somebody had rinsed a brush in the clouds and flicked it over the hill. Grandad Ellis, who had grafted every tree on that slope himself, said they were hunting the last sugar before the frost. He wouldn't look up. He had a rule about watching things that were leaving.

I climbed the old Discovery to get a better view and came down with cider-sticky hands and a bruise on my shin where the ladder slipped. By then the butterflies were settling on the split fruit, wings closing slowly like folded letters, and I stood very still so as not to frighten them off. Grandad came up the path with the basket and didn't say a word. He just set it down and started picking around them, leaving the drops where they lay.

When we walked back down in the dusk, the last of them were still lifting off the grass, smaller now, trailing down the hedge towards the river. Grandad raised one hand to them the way you would to a train.