Colour tattoo of butterflies and an orange flower with swirling vines across a woman's upper back and shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterflies and orange flower across a back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind, showing a large tattoo of butterflies in varied colours fluttering across her upper back and down towards her lower back. An orange flower with green leaves sits near the left shoulder blade, joined by thin swirling vine linework. The butterflies have soft colour shading and the image is a plain, evenly lit indoor shot with a light background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ada,

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The wind backed round to the south on Tuesday and that's when the butterflies came aboard, a dozen at first, then a cloud of orange and blue settling on the rigging as if someone had shaken out a cloth of stained glass. Mr Pryce the bosun swears they were blown off the Canaries, though I told him they'd had a better notion than we had about where the land was.

They wouldn't leave the galley. I found three on the sugar tin and one asleep in the folds of the flour sack, wings closed to the colour of dead leaves, then opening them when the sun touched the porthole. I tried to shoo them out with a tea towel, and the cook's boy caught one in his cupped hands and held it up to me like a lantern. Its wings were faintly furred, like the bloom on a plum.

The captain says we'll be in Montevideo by the end of the month, and I have a notion the butterflies will get off before we do, because they've been drifting toward the bow in ones and twos all morning. Yesterday I found a small orange one on the rail beside the pot of geraniums I keep for the lad's mother, and next to it a trail of green vine I'd not noticed before, coiling round the brass hinge as neat as handwriting.

I'm keeping the tea towel. I fold the sugar tin lid back carefully now so nothing gets crushed, and I leave the porthole open a crack at night. If this reaches you in April, look for a flower pressed flat on the paper. That's the last of the orange ones.

Yours, Nell

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