Watercolour-style butterfly tattoo in pink, red and blue with black outlines and splatter, on the ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour butterfly on an ankle

Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A butterfly with bold black outlined wings is filled with loose pink and red washes, with blue at the lower wings. Black ink splatter and drips surround the design, giving a painted, watercolour-like effect. The tattoo sits on the lower leg against a white towel.

Ankle Butterfly Wing Ink splatter Drip

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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

Pass me the poker, and mind the cat, she thinks my knees are a mountain. Now, you want the one about the blue-bellied girl who painted the Hollin Wood with a spilt pot of madder and a jar of ink? Everybody in Thornback knows it, but the old ones tell it wrong, so I'll tell it right.

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Marjorie Penhallow kept the dye shed at the bottom of the lane, where the stream runs brown and then runs red when the dyers empty their vats. She had a bad habit of talking to moths. One wet October she knocked over the madder crock while arguing with a grey moth that would not leave her lamp alone, and the whole red pool ran down the step and into the ditch, and by morning the ditch was full of colour that wouldn't wash out. The moth flew straight into it, came out pink at the wingtips, and went off across the common like it owned the place.

What happened next is that the moth came back the following spring, bigger, with black lines painted round its wings like someone had gone over them with a fine brush and a grudge. Marjorie swore it was the same moth. Her sister swore it was a different one. But the blue came after, when the lad from the mill dropped his indigo jar off the bridge and the splash ran down the bank in streaks, and that is the reason the Hollin butterflies have blue at the bottom of their wings to this day, and why the wood smells faintly of ink after rain.

So when you go up through the trees and see one come down on the path with its wings all smudged and dripping, don't swat at it. It's only Marjorie's moth, looking for the pot she never got to finish.