Colourful butterfly tattoo with a paintbrush body on a person's lower abdomen, with black-outlined rainbow wings and watercolour splashes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour butterfly with paintbrush on the hip

Other · Colour · Photo

A butterfly tattoo sits on the side of a person's lower abdomen, just below the navel, with a paintbrush forming its body. The left wing has bold black outlines filled with segmented rainbow colours, while the right wing is softer, with blended blue, purple and pink washes and splatter-like spots. The photo is taken close up and the tattoo fills the centre of the frame, with denim jeans and a light blue top visible at the bottom edge.

Other Butterfly Paintbrush Wing Splashes Rainbow Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, I am writing from the top loft of Hallow's Orchard, where the air smells of windfall apples going soft in the long grass. You will laugh, but the old brush you left on the sill has become a thing of local fame. Mrs Pryce from the cottage swears a red admiral sat on its handle for an hour, and that when she lifted it, the bristles were wet with paint nobody had mixed.

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I tried to paint the wall of the drying shed this morning, the one with the cracked lime plaster. My tin of ultramarine had dried to a crust, so I thinned it with a splash of cider vinegar from the barrel and worked it into wet paper. The colour bled outward the way ink does when you drop it in water, blue into violet into a pink I had no business putting there. By noon the sheet looked like a pair of wings pressed flat between the pages of a book.

Tom, the boy who picks for Mr Ashdown, came up the ladder with a cup of tea and stood looking at it for a long while. He said his gran used to tell him butterflies are only paint that got tired of waiting to be used. I did not know what to say, so I handed him the brush. He dipped it in the blue and drew a single straight line down the middle, black at the edges, and then gave it back to me and went down the ladder whistling.

I have left the sheet pinned up to dry. This morning there was a real butterfly on it, black-veined, opening and closing its wings over the wet blue as if deciding which colour to keep. Write soon, and tell me whether the seaside light has finally got into your hands. Yours, Clare.