Line drawing of a stylised butterfly with blue and black wings and curved antennae on a white background, shown as a tattoo design with no body part visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue and black butterfly line design

Mixed · Flash

A stylised butterfly drawn in flowing, single-weight lines, with the upper and lower wings outlined in blue and inner wing shapes picked out in black. The body is a slim black form with a small circle at the head and two curved antennae. The design sits centred on a plain white background with wide margins.

Butterfly Wing Antennae Line art

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift at the Mill Road infirmary had stopped again between the fourth floor and the fifth, so Nell Hardcastle climbed the last flight with the drug trolley rattling behind her. Ward Seven was quiet at three in the morning. Only the pumps ticked and the radiators knocked like someone wanting to be let in. Her grandmother had told her that a ward at night is a ship with the lamps turned low, and that the sailors on it are the ones who do not sleep.

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On the windowsill of bay C, where the glass threw back the lights of the car park, there was a butterfly. It was not pinned to anything. It sat with its wings open, the outer edges drawn in blue, the inner shapes in black, and its two feelers curled up like the tips of a question. Nell had seen it the winter before, and the winter before that, always on the sill of the bed where somebody would be going home in the morning. Her gran said these were the ones who had been sent to see the patient out.

Mr Idris Calloway was awake in bed nine, holding his tea cup in both hands though it had gone cold an hour ago. He watched the butterfly for a long time before he spoke. "My wife used to say the wings were the easy part," he said. "Anybody can draw a wing. It is the feelers that tell you someone is still listening." Nell did not know what to answer, so she checked his line and wrote his obs on the chart, and when she looked up the sill was empty.

In the morning he went home in a taxi with his coat over his arm. Nell opened the window of bay C to let the air in, and out in the dark above the car park she saw it go, lit faintly at the edges, black at the heart, as if the night had only been waiting for the glass to be opened.