Stippled grey dotwork butterfly on the outer thigh, surrounded by red geometric lines, a circle, a beaded chain and a small flower.

Butterfly and red geometric lines on a thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A butterfly with wings shaded in stippled dotwork sits across the thigh, with its body and veins outlined in black. Surrounding it are fine red geometric lines forming starbursts, a large circle and a triangular grid, with a chain of open beads and a dotted, outlined flower below. The composition is diagonal, with the butterfly overlapping the red linework and the flower anchoring the lower right.

Dotwork Geometric Thigh Butterfly Geometric line Circle Bead Flower Dot Starburst

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, and mind the bunting, it has ears. You want the lantern story, the one about Mabel Ferris and the moth? Then hush. The Lantern Ballroom in Harrowgate had a sprung floor that breathed under your feet, and every Saturday the band played until the gas ran low. Nobody danced with Mabel that season. She sewed beads onto her cuffs, twenty-two of them in a chain, and counted them under her breath like a rosary.

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Then came the stranger with the red chalk. He was a surveyor from the council, or said he was, and he carried a rolled sheet of tracing paper covered in circles and lines that cut the room into stars. He pinned it to the cloakroom wall. 'Every dance has a centre,' he said, 'and the centre is a circle, and the circle wants crossing.' Mabel laughed at him. But the Saturday after, she came in with pale dust on her shoulder and a dot of red on each knuckle, and she walked straight to the middle of the floor where the chalk ring had been.

The moth came in at ten past eleven, drawn to the lamps the way they always were. It was the big swallowtail kind, the sort that turns up in Yorkshire cellars once in a generation, its wings grey as slate and speckled like frost on a window. It landed on the chandelier, then on her beaded cuff, then on the paper lilies someone had pinned to the piano. Each time it settled, the red threads strung across the ceiling seemed to hum.

The band stopped. Nobody could say afterwards who started the waltz again. Mabel danced the whole length of the floor with the moth riding her wrist, the beads sliding down her arm like a rope of pearls, and when the lamps went out at two she was gone. The moth was still on the lilies. The surveyor's sheet was still on the wall, and in the morning, so they say, a new line had been drawn across it in red, running straight out of the door and off towards the sea.