Black and grey butterfly tattoo with lace-like wing detail and swirling scrollwork, with a pink ribbon overlapping it, on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly and pink ribbon with scrollwork on ribs

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A butterfly with lace-like, floral-patterned wings sits among black swirling scrollwork that extends across the side of the torso. A translucent pink ribbon crosses the lower left of the design, and the butterfly's wings are shaded in grey with fine black detail. The composition is a single asymmetrical piece that flows from the upper right to the lower left of the frame.

Ribs Butterfly Ribbon Swirl Scrollwork Flower Lace

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the kettle and sit yourself down, because I'm only telling this once and my knees won't stand for a second go. You'll have heard of Ada Pimm, who did the lace for the chapel Whit Walk. It wasn't the chapel lace she was known for in the end. It was the butterflies.

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Every spring the mill whistle went at six, and Ada was already at her frame by the window, bobbins clicking like a clock that had lost its patience. She made lace the way other women made pastry, without measuring, and her wings came out finer than anything the Co-op sold. Folk brought her thread ends and buttons and asked for a bit of nonsense to pin on a hat. She always said the butterflies weren't for hats. They were for people who'd been told to sit still.

Then came the summer her brother Walter went off to the coast with a cardboard suitcase and a promise to send for her. His letters came in pencil, and each one had a scrap of ribbon folded inside, pink as a boiled sweet. Ada never asked what they meant. She only worked a little pink thread through the edge of every wing she made after that, so that when the light caught them they seemed to be lifting off the cloth.

The last one she made was for Walter's Ellen, who came up the lane in black one wet Tuesday carrying a parcel. Inside was a butterfly as big as a palm, scrolled round with tendrils that ran off the edge of the paper, and a single pink ribbon looped across its lower corner. Ellen pinned it to her coat and didn't take it off for a year.