Colour tattoo of a watercolour-style butterfly in pinks, reds and teals with ink splatters on the inner forearm, above a small solid black circle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour butterfly on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A butterfly with soft, blended wings in pink, red, teal and blue sits on the forearm, with loose red and black splatters trailing downward. The shading is painterly with no hard outlines on the wings, while a small solid black circle with a heart-like cut-out sits below it on the wrist. The warm, plain background keeps the focus on the colour and the skin.

Forearm Butterfly Watercolour Splatter Circle Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Maud,

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The snow has shut the Crow and Lantern since Tuesday, and the landlady has run out of everything except dried apricots and a sort of sherry that tastes of matches. I have been painting the window. Not the glass, the frost on it. When the stove warms the room the frost goes soft at the edges and runs, and for a minute there is a smear of red and teal sliding down the pane, exactly the colour of your father's old silk scarf. I know you will say I should be mending the shutters instead. The landlady agrees with you.

Yesterday a man came in off the moor with a cut on his palm and a moth in a jam jar. He would not say where he had got it. He said the moth had been beating against the lamp of his cart for three miles and he could not bear to leave it to freeze. Its wings had gone the colour of wet brick and bruised plum, with rags of blue at the edges, as though someone had washed a brush over them and not quite finished. We set the jar on the sill and watched it for an hour while he drank his brandy and the wind worried at the door.

This morning the jar was empty, the lid lifted and set neatly beside it. The sill was dusted with pale scales and a scatter of small black specks, as if someone had flicked ink from a loaded brush. I do not know whether he let it go or whether it went on its own. I keep thinking the frost on the window looked, for a moment, exactly like its wing.

The road should be clear by Thursday. I will bring you a jar of frost if I can keep it from melting, and you can tell me whether it is really the same colour as the moth.

Yours in ink and cold, Ada