Watercolour-style butterfly tattoo with black outline and pink, blue and teal washes on the outer calf.

Watercolour butterfly on a calf

Calf · Colour · Photo

A butterfly with outstretched wings sits in the centre of the image, drawn with dark, slightly sketchy black outlines. Its wings and body are filled with soft pink, purple, blue and teal washes that bleed beyond the linework into a loose halo of colour. The photograph is taken straight on against a wooden floor, with the tattoo filling the middle of the frame.

Calf Butterfly Wing Watercolour

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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 rain came off the ridge sideways, and by the time you had the hazard lights going, the Ostler Flat road had turned to a river of brown glass. Nobody else had been out since morning. You sat with the engine ticking and the wipers frozen mid-sweep, watching the windscreen blur into pink and teal where the sun was breaking through the cloud behind the mesa.

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Then the butterflies came. They lifted out of the creosote in ones and twos, then in a loose cloud, and they were nothing like the brown moths your grandmother kept pinned in a frame above the piano. These had wings the colour of wet paint, and when they settled on the bonnet the washes bled past their edges and spread across the metal as if someone had dipped a brush in the sky and shaken it. Dolores at the petrol station had told you the desert only did this once every few years, after a proper soak, when the seeds woke and everything that had been waiting for water came out at once.

You had been waiting too, if you were honest. The letter from the lawyer in Tucson was folded in the glovebox, with the photograph of the house you were supposed to sell. You had meant to be across the state line by now. Instead you wound the window down. One butterfly walked along the rim of the wiper arm, opening and closing its wings with great care, and you found yourself holding your breath in case it tipped over.

When the sun finally cleared the ridge, the cloud lifted and the road began to steam. The butterfly lifted with it. You took out the letter, turned it over, and on the blank back wrote the directions to the house in your own handwriting. Then you drove on slowly with the window open, following the faint colour the rain had left behind.