Solid black butterfly tattoo on the upper thigh of a person standing on grass, wearing a lace skirt and blue canvas trainers.

Black butterfly tattoo on a thigh

Blackwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a black butterfly tattoo on the upper thigh, with both wings shown as bold filled black shapes and a slim body between them. The legs are shown from the knee to the thigh against a soft-focus background of grass and ground, with a lace hem at the top of the frame. The image uses warm, film-like tones and the ink is the only dark element against the skin.

Blackwork Thigh Butterfly Insect Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lock-keeper at Hollin Weir had a saying that no black butterfly ever flew upstream, so when one came crawling up the tiller of the narrowboat Thessaly, Maud Corrigan put down her kettle and watched it. It was the colour of wet coal, its wings split along the veins like old slate. The bargeman, Eli, said it was only a butterfly and should be shooed off before it laid eggs in the coal bunker.

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But Maud knew the story her grandmother told on the cut at Stoke: that black butterflies are the souls of boatmen who drowned without a bell rung for them, and that they travel downstream with the current until they find a hull still afloat. They ride the barges home. She kept her voice low. Eli laughed, then stopped laughing when the butterfly lifted and settled on the rope he had been splicing, its wings opening slow as a hand.

All that night the Thessaly went through three locks in the dark, the water rising and falling under the gates like breath. At each lock Maud lit the lamp and held it up, and the butterfly sat on the brass rail and did not move. At dawn, where the Trent meets the cut, it rose and went down the river toward the sea, and Eli found he had been holding the tiller so hard his knuckles had gone white.

He never did splice that rope. Maud hung it on a nail by the stove, and every spring after, when the first black butterflies came over the towpath, she set the kettle on for two cups and left the door open a crack.