White line drawing of a butterfly with ivy leaves and branches in its wings and a tree of life inside a circle on its body, shown on a dark grey background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Botanical butterfly with tree of life body

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a symmetrical butterfly with open wings filled with fine white linework of ivy leaves, twigs, flowers and fern-like sprigs. Its body holds a circular medallion containing a branching tree of life, framed by dotted rings and a dark outline. The design is rendered in cream lines on a charcoal background, with no shading and a balanced, mandala-like composition.

Botanical Geometric Butterfly Moth Leaves Branches Tree of life Mandala Flower Fern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ticket office at Hollin Cross has been locked since the Beeching men came with their pencils, but Mrs Adair still sweeps its step every Thursday. I found her there the morning the ivy came down, a ladder propped against the shelter and her sleeves rolled to the elbow, pulling green rope off the brickwork as though it owed her money.

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Under the ivy the wall was pale and printed with things I had never noticed: a tangle of bramble stems, a fern frond pressed flat, a window frame with a crack running out of it like a branch. She told me her husband had been the last porter here. He used to stand on the platform in July and wait for the one moth that came every evening to settle on the lamp above the bench, a dusty cream-winged thing he called the Lady of the Line.

Last summer the moth did not come. Mrs Adair said it was the ivy that had drawn it, that ivy holds the warmth and moths follow warmth, so she had cut it all back in the hope the old lamp would call something else. I said nothing. The cuttings lay in heaps along the cinders, their leaves still glossy, and the wall beneath was bare and cold.

That evening I came back with a torch and found a moth on the lamp glass, wings spread wide, its body banded like a bough. It had not come for the ivy. It had come for the lamp she had left burning, and for the woman sitting on the bench below it with a flask and a timetable from 1958. I switched off my torch and let her have the platform.