Pastel butterfly tattoo in pale blue, yellow-green and red on the ankle of a person wearing grey shoes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour butterfly on an ankle

Ankle · Colour · Photo

A butterfly with pale blue and yellow-green wings, outlined softly and marked with red spots, sits on the ankle above a grey shoe with a bow. The shading is soft and blended, giving the wings a painted, watercolour look. Colour ink dominates the design against the plain skin and grey stone background.

Ankle Butterfly Wing Insect Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brush was the wrong size, Ada decided, but Mr Lowry would have to make do with it, because the brimstone had already died on the windowsill and the light was going. She mixed a little lemon yellow with a touch of gall and washed it thin across the paper, leaving the grain showing through so the wings would look as if they had been breathed onto. The blue was harder. It had come from a pale sky she had watched through the kitchen window all afternoon, and she had tried to keep that colour on her palette before it faded.

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That morning the creature had come to rest on the grey wool of her shoe while she sat on the front step shelling peas. It had stayed for the length of a hymn from the church across the lane, opening and closing its wings as slowly as a sleeper breathes, and then it had lifted over the churchyard wall and gone. She had sketched it on the back of an envelope. Mr Lowry would never believe a butterfly could be so patient, so she did not tell him where she had found it.

He came on Thursday with his magnifying glass and his cabinet keys. He turned the paper to the window and frowned. "Too pretty by half, Mrs Pell. Nature is not so generous with her blues."

Ada took the painting back from him, dipped the smallest brush in the red, and placed two spots on the forewing with great care. "Then I shall have to be less generous with mine," she said.

He took it to London in a flat leather case. Months later she saw a notice in the parish paper that the Society had hung a painted butterfly above the desk of its secretary, a pleasant man who could never quite recall where it had been collected.