Colour tattoo of a grey and white butterfly with a pink ribbon and soft blue wash, placed on the upper back, in a realistic style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly and pink ribbon on upper back

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A butterfly with grey wings marked by white spots and shaded highlights sits above a pink ribbon that loops beneath it. A soft blue wash sits behind the ribbon and a faint pink flush surrounds the design on the skin. The shading is smooth and gradual, with the butterfly rendered in greys and the ribbon in pinks and blues against a light skin tone.

Realism Back Butterfly Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wedding cloth had been dyed in the wrong vat, so when Maud Tennant pinned it to the hedge that morning it came out the colour of a shell rather than cream, and the old women of Lower Mell said nothing good would come of it. They were not wrong about everything. A grey butterfly, speckled like a wet slate, had followed the cart up from the river and would not leave the hawthorn.

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Maud's son Ansel was to marry Ilse Corrie at dusk, and the custom in Lower Mell was that a ribbon of pink wool be tied to the wrist of whoever stood nearest the bride's mother. Nobody had told the butterfly. It settled on the ribbon in the middle of the bread-breaking, and when Ilse reached to shoo it away it lifted only as far as her shoulder and stayed there, opening and closing its wings as though it were counting the guests.

The mill-keeper's wife, who had buried two husbands and talked to both of them in her sleep, said the butterfly was the last of the summer and would take a little of the year with it when it went. So they let it be. Ilse wore it on her shoulder through the vows, through the fiddling, through the long reel in the barn where the lamps smoked and the floor sang under everyone's boots.

At first light the ribbon was still knotted at Maud's wrist and the butterfly was gone, leaving only a pale blue dust on the wool. Ansel found his mother at the gate, turning the knot over with her thumb. Some things, she said, come to a wedding to be looked at and then go on ahead to see the road is clear. He did not ask her what she meant, and she did not tell him, and the hedge was bare of anything but leaves.