Colour butterfly tattoo with black floral swirls and a red flower on a person's shoulder blade, shown in a three-photo collage.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly and floral swirls on shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A butterfly with paisley-style patterns in yellow, green, blue and pink sits at the centre, edged with fine black dotted outlines. Black scrolling lines and grey-shaded leaves surround it, with a red and orange flower at the lower left. The three photos show the same shoulder blade tattoo from different angles, with soft indoor lighting.

Botanical Shoulder Back Butterfly Flower Swirl Paisley Floral Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fair came to Hollin Dale the week the beck froze, and Nell Osgood came with it, painting the wagons by lamplight because the days were too short for her. She did not paint faces or horses like the others. She painted butterflies, each one folded into a paisley of yellow, green and blue, edged with a black dotted line so fine the village children swore it was frost.

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Ada Pryor, who sold toffee apples from the cart beside the roundabout, asked her once why she never painted a flower without a butterfly sitting on it. Nell wiped her brush on a rag and said flowers stayed where they were put, but a butterfly had to be talked into staying. She had been talked into it herself, she said, by a man who sold clocks, and she had let him go on talking until the clocks ran down.

The fair left on the Tuesday after the thaw, the wagons going north with their lamps unlit. When Ada went to fetch her cart the next morning, there was a new butterfly on the tailboard, yellow and green, with a red flower at its foot and its wings still tacky. Nell was gone, and nobody had seen her go.

Ada scraped a sliver of the paint with her thumbnail and kept it in a tin with her mother's buttons. Every spring after, when the first butterfly came over the beck, she went out to see whether it had been talked into staying. Most had not. One always did.