Blood Vein

The wings are cream coloured with bold red or purple fascia forming a diagonal stripe across forewings and hindwings. All wings are fringed with the same colour. The tornus of the hindwing is sharply angled giving a distinctive shape. The wingspan is 30–35 mm.

It has a scattered distribution in western and central Europe north of the Alps. In the British Isles the distribution is patchy outside southern England and Wales. In far eastern Europe – east of a line running roughly from Finland through Estonia – it is replaced by its sister species Timandra griseata. The species were split in 1931, only to be subsequently re-merged by most authors. But since 1994, new research has come out in favour of treating them as distinct species.