A blue and purple butterfly with spotted wing edges, printed on a white square transfer sheet against a dark grey background.

Blue and purple butterfly transfer design

Colour · Flash

A butterfly is printed in full view on a white square, with its wings spread open and a thin pair of antennae rising from its head. The wings are filled with bright blue panels edged in deep purple, with small yellow and pink dots along the outer margins. The image is a colour photograph with soft shadow beneath the design, set against a plain dark grey wall.

Butterfly Wing Antennae

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had been told twice to bin the proof, and twice she had carried it back to the bench instead. It was a single butterfly on a white card, printed too bright by the machine on the far wall, the blue panels gone almost electric and the purple margins bruised along their edges. Ivor said the colour had run because someone had left an ink tin open over a weekend. Nell said nothing. She thought it looked like something that had got out of a jar.

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The works sat at the end of a cul-de-sac in Hebden Bridge, where the river ran loud under the mill windows and the van drivers came for their orders before the rain did. Every morning the sheets came off the press warm, and every morning Nell checked the wings against the master, dot by dot, the little yellow spots along the margins that always wandered if the paper was damp. This one had wandered further than the rest. Its dots sat in a loose curve, like a route someone had drawn on a map and then changed their mind about.

On Friday a man in a grey anorak came in asking for a batch of transfers for a summer fair, and he picked the rejected card off the windowsill without asking. He turned it to the light. "This is the one," he said, as though they had spoken before. He paid for it, folded it carefully into his coat, and walked out towards the road that climbed over the moor.

Nell stood at the door until the sound of his engine had faded. Then she lifted the master sheet, lined up the next wing, and pressed the roller down hard.