Painterly watercolour-style butterfly tattoo in orange, yellow, blue and pink with dark wing edges, sitting on the upper chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour butterfly on upper chest

Chest · Colour · Photo

A butterfly is shown in loose, splashed strokes, with its wings and body outlined in dark ink. Orange, yellow, green, blue and pink washes bleed outwards into the surrounding skin, giving a soft painted effect. The design is centred in a close-up of pale skin, with a dark area visible at the top right edge of the frame.

Chest Butterfly Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gel colouring went over at ten to four, a squeezed tube of saffron yellow and a bottle of pink Dolores had bought for a christening and never opened. I was mopping the steel bench with my sleeves rolled, half asleep, when the bleed ran across the parchment and into the flour dust, and by the time I reached for a cloth it had already made a shape. Wings, I thought. Two smudged wings lifting off the marble.

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Dolores came through from the back with her glasses pushed up into her hair and a cup of tea going cold in her hand. She didn't wipe it. She tilted her head the way she does at a loaf that might be underproved and said her husband Teodor used to paint butterflies in the margins of his order books, the kind that flew off to the coast every summer and never sent postcards. He would lay the watercolour down wet and let it run, she said, because a butterfly is only colour that has agreed to hold still for a moment.

We didn't bake anything with it. She pinned the sheet to the cork board above the ovens, between the wholesale list and a photo of a cat that belonged to nobody, and told me to leave it there. Forty minutes later the first trays came out, the window going from black to a thin, dishwater grey, and I saw the shape again on the board, somehow more finished than before, as if it had been waiting for someone to look properly.

The sheet is still pinned up there. Every morning before I lift the shutters I check that it hasn't flown off.