Colour tattoo of two pink and magenta butterflies and pink flowers on a black vine, across the upper back.

Butterflies and pink flowers on upper back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

The design shows two butterflies with black outlines and magenta and pink shading, joined by a black vine stem that carries several outlined pink flowers. The black linework is bold and smooth, and the pink tones are softly graded inside the wings and petals. The motif runs diagonally down the skin, with a larger butterfly near the top and a smaller one lower down.

Botanical Back Butterfly Flower Vine Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, that one's loose, it's been loose since my father's time, and he never fixed it either. Sit where you can see the glass. There. Now, you want to know why the vine on the north wall flowers pink when every other vine in Scarrow Bay goes green and sulks? I'll tell you what my mother told me, and she had it from a woman who sold eggs at the harbour.

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Every summer the moths came in off the sea thick as snow, chasing the lamp, and every summer a few of them burned. Mother's garden was a stubborn thing, a vine climbing the wall and nothing else. One August a butterfly no bigger than a thumbnail landed on the vine and didn't leave. Then came a bigger one, then a dozen, and the vine began putting out flowers wherever a wing had touched it, pink as the inside of a shell.

The keeper that year, a man called Tobias Penhale, swore the butterflies were drowned sailors come back to watch the lamp. Mother said that was nonsense, and then she said nothing at all, because on the night the Mary Ellen went onto the Teeth, the butterflies rose off the vine in one cloud and flew straight out over the water, circling where the boat was going down. Three men were pulled out alive who would have died without that light.

So the vine blooms pink when someone on this coast has been brought home safe. Count the flowers if you don't believe me. There's one for each of them, and Tobias made the last one himself.