Black and grey butterfly tattoos cascade down a bare back, with stars near the neck and scrolling vine work across the lower back.

Butterflies and scrollwork across a back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a bare back showing a column of butterflies rising from the lower back towards the shoulders, with a few stars and partial words near the neck. The butterflies are shaded in soft greys with fine outlines, while the lower back has bold scrolling vine and swirl linework. The composition is centred on the spine, with the subject's head and face out of frame.

Back Butterfly Star Scroll Vine Swirl Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The women of Hollin Dale said the butterflies came up out of the mud at the foot of the hill on the first warm night after the thaw, and that they went looking for whoever had been kind to them. Most people laughed at this. My grandmother did not laugh. She kept a tin of pale wings on the windowsill and would not say where the tin had come from, only that the hill had the right of it.

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Nell Abbott swept the path beneath the walnut tree each evening that spring, drawing with the broom a long curl of vine that ended in a spiral, the way her father had shown her to mark a grave. Her brother said it was foolishness and trod through it twice a day. She swept it again. On the ninth night a tinker came up the lane with a cart of copper pans and a limp, asked for water, and sat on the bench under the walnut to drink it. He wore a grey coat with a stripe of silver stars along the collar, and when he laughed the lamp in the window flickered.

He told her that twelve winters back, on the moor road, a girl had given him her last crust and her dry stocking, and he had never forgotten it. Nell did not remember. The wind came up the lane. Butterflies rose from the drawn vine, pale as ash, and climbed his coat from the hem to the shoulders, lifting like a sleeve of breath. He stood, bowed, and walked off with the cart, the wings still settled on him. In the morning Nell swept the path again and found nothing but the curl of vine and one silver star pressed into the dust.