Colour tattoo of five butterflies in pink, grey, red and purple with black outlines, following a purple swirling line up an upper arm.

Butterflies spiralling up an upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

Five butterflies in pink, grey-white, red and purple are arranged along a thin purple swirling line that rises up the arm. Each wing has bold black outlines and shaded striped patterns within the wings. The colour ink dominates against the skin, and the image is a close, well-lit view of the arm with a dark background.

Upper arm Butterfly Swirl Wing Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Carrick had catalogued the Hollins Street lepidoptera for eleven years, and in all that time not one specimen had left its drawer. So when she came in on Monday to find five of them pinned to the stairwell wall, climbing in a loose spiral from the skirting board to the height of her shoulder, she assumed the night cleaner had been playing with the collection again.

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The pins were the old steel ones from the Victorian cases, and each butterfly had been set with its wings spread just so. A thread of purple wool ran between them, looped and knotted at every pin, the way her grandmother once strung beads for a tin of buttons. Pink, then grey-white, then red, then a violet so deep it looked wet. Black borders on every wing. Nell knew the species from their labels, and she knew none of them had been on display since 1974.

Harold, the night cleaner, swore on his mother that he had touched nothing above the mop bucket. He wanted to go home. Nell stood beneath the spiral with her coffee going cold and followed the wool up the plaster, past the last butterfly, to a small brass hook where it ended in a neat, tied bow.

That afternoon she checked the accession book. Lot 212, a drawer of Papilio and Vanessa, had been signed out in her own handwriting, dated the week her father died. She had no memory of signing anything. She took the pins down one at a time, wound the purple wool round her finger, and carried the tray back to the cabinets without telling the trustees.