Two photographs of butterfly tattoos on a woman's upper back: a black linework butterfly with swirling vines on the left, and blue and teal butterflies on the shoulder blade on the right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterflies on upper back and shoulder blade

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

The left photograph shows a solid black butterfly with decorative swirling vine linework trailing across the upper back, with a blue top strap visible at the bottom edge. The right photograph shows two blue and teal butterflies with detailed patterned wings placed over the shoulder blade on bare skin. The composition is a side-by-side pair of close, well-lit shots focused on the tattoos.

Botanical Back Shoulder Butterfly Vine Swirl Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The damp got into drawer nine on a Tuesday, and by Thursday a dozen of the specimens had let go of their pins. Ida Pratt worked through them at the kitchen table with a pair of tweezers, a bottle of gum tragacanth and the reading lamp pulled close. Each wing had to be coaxed back into the shape her grandfather had given it sixty years before, when he had pinned them in the back room of the Holmfirth Mechanics' Institute and written the places on tiny cards in a hand like climbing ivy.

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The black one was the trouble. It had no colour to speak of, only a dark sheen where the light caught its scales, and its wings were edged with lines that curled and doubled back on themselves like bindweed. The card said Vine Hill, July 1931, and nothing else. Ida worked the gum under the forewing with the flat end of a needle, holding her breath as though it might wake. When the wing finally sat flat she found a folded slip of paper caught beneath the label, thin as onion skin, covered in the same looping script.

It was not a list of specimens. It was a set of instructions for drawing a vine, stroke by stroke, starting from the wing root and ending at a point the paper called home. Underneath, in pencil pressed so hard it had torn the paper, was a single line: For Ida, when you are old enough to be patient. She laughed out loud in the empty kitchen, then sat very still for a while.

Callum rang in the morning about the sale. The council wanted the cabinet cleared by Friday. She told him she would be keeping drawer nine, and the black butterfly with the vines, and that he could take the rest. She set the paper on the windowsill where the sun would reach it, then took up her pencil and began, very slowly, to draw.