Colour tattoo of a purple and teal butterfly with a gold ribbon and the word Survivor in script on the outer thigh.

Butterfly and ribbon with Survivor script

Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A small butterfly with purple and teal wings is wrapped by a gold ribbon, with a curled antenna at the top and the word Survivor in black script below. The linework is black and outlined, with flat, soft colour fills inside the wings and ribbon. The tattoo sits centrally on a pale patch of skin against a plain, neutral background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The night the last northbound train was cancelled, Mags Tolliver stood on the platform at Haddow Junction with a paper cup of tea going cold between her hands and told the stationmaster's boy that the butterfly was the only honest creature on the line. Everything else had a timetable. The butterfly had no ticket and no station of its own, and still it came down the cutting every spring as though somebody had sent for it.

Keep reading

She had a wing of her own once, she said, a purple one, and a ribbon of gold thread that the ladies of the church guild sewed on to a bag of raffle prizes. The ribbon was for the other sort of hope, the sort you pin on a coat when a doctor has said a word you will not repeat at supper. The boy asked what the word was. Mags just smiled and told him the word had gone out on the last train and never come back, which was the whole point of trains.

When the signal changed at half past two, the wind swung round and took the cup from her hands, and she watched the tea spatter the rails like a little dark map. Then she walked to the end of the platform where the lamp hung, and there, caught on the iron, was a blue-winged moth or a butterfly, flattened and damp and still very much alive. It opened its wings once, slowly, as if reading a sign. Mags said nothing else that night, and the boy understood that the story had finished itself.

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