Flash design of blue, purple and pink butterflies joined by a swirling dark line decorated with stars and dots, on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterflies and star swirl flash design

Fine line · Colour · Flash

Five butterflies in blue, purple and pink sit along a thin dark swirling line that is decorated with small stars and dots. The wings use soft colour gradients with pink edges and light shading. The design is arranged diagonally across a plain white background, with the butterflies spaced around the curving line.

Fine line Butterfly Star Swirl Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The well at the bottom of Cullow garden went dry the summer Mab Tindall planted her beans a month early, and by August the water was carried up from the beck in two pails that slopped on the stairs. Her grandmother said the wet had gone because the swallows had quarrelled with the rain. Mab did not believe that. She believed the stars had been careless.

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On the night of the first new moon she sat on the wall with a lantern and counted them aloud, the way her grandmother counted hens. When she reached the one that hung low over the hedge, a line of light came loose from it and unspooled across the sky, thin as thread and dotted with small bright beads. Where it touched the garden, five butterflies lifted off the bean rows, blue ones and violet ones with their edges turned to the colour of dawn, and they followed the line around and around the orchard.

Mab followed too, in her nightdress, until the line knotted itself in the old pear tree and the butterflies settled on the lowest branch like lamps being hung. "You have been spilling the sky's water," she told them, "and I need it back." The eldest blue one folded its wings, the pear tree gave a long creak like a door, and in the morning the well was full to the brim, cold and clear, with a single star lying on the surface like a coin.

Her grandmother filled the first pail and said nothing about swallows. Mab kept the trick to herself, and every new moon after she walked out to the pear tree and asked the butterflies for only as much as the beans could drink.