Black and grey butterfly with filigree wings beside a grey awareness ribbon reading Diabetes, with a small red drip, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly and diabetes awareness ribbon

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The subject is a butterfly with ornate, filigree-patterned black wings beside a grey awareness ribbon that reads Diabetes. The ribbon is shaded in soft grey tones, and a small red drip runs from its lower edge. The linework is clean and the shading sits smoothly on pale skin against a blurred, dark background.

Forearm Butterfly Awareness ribbon Filigree Drip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the candle, Marta's boy has already set his sleeve alight once this winter. Now. In the kingdom of Corrowmere, where the rivers ran uphill on feast days, there lived a lacemaker called Aud who could cut wings out of nothing but thread and patience. Her bobbins clacked from dawn until the bells, and every pattern she made had a hidden curl in it, a little spiral like the tail of a sleeping cat.

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The Queen of Corrowmere had a grey silk ribbon that ran the length of the palace stairs. Every name of every child born in the realm was stitched along it in black, and the ribbon was never allowed to fray, for a fraying ribbon meant a forgotten child. Aud was given the work of mending it the spring the frost came early and the ribbon grew thin at the bottom step.

She sat three nights with it. On the third she pricked her thumb on the needle, and a single bead of red went through the silk and ran down toward the floor, slow as honey. The guards swore it was a curse. The old steward said it was only a warning. Aud said nothing, but she took her finest thread and wove a moth out of the wind that blew under the door, and set its wings to the ribbon's edge so the red could not spread.

It worked, and the moth stayed. People still say that if you climb those stairs at dusk, you will see it there, its filigree wings catching the lamplight, keeping watch over the names. Whether it watches for the lost or for the living, nobody will tell you. Now, who's for the last of the mulled cider?