Black and white top-down photo of a shirtless rider on a motorcycle, showing an outlined butterfly and rose tattoos on the upper back.

Butterfly and roses on a rider's back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A top-down black and white photograph of a shirtless rider seated on a touring motorcycle with hard saddlebags, their head turned away from the camera. The upper back shows an outlined butterfly with spread wings, two rose designs above it and a smaller, darker design lower down the spine. The tattoos are in black and grey against the pale ground, with the bike's chrome and dark bodywork filling the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell,

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The salt road was white again this morning, so I left the Moth in the lee of the water tower at Harrow Cross and walked the last six miles to the cistern like a sensible person. You will say I should have sent word. The radio at the cistern has been dead since the spring, and I did not want to waste a battery on news that would only make you cross.

Something about the bike is off. Since the carburettor went at Wetherby I have been coaxing it along on the old reserve, and the chrome on the saddlebags has gone the colour of weak tea. Still, when the sun comes off the dunes it throws light back at me from every mirror, and I forget the aches. Grandad would have laughed at me for keeping a machine this long. He always said a bike is only as true as the hands that mend it.

I found the roses on the door of the cistern, which is why I am writing at all. Someone has painted two of them in red and grey, a little above a butterfly with its wings spread wide, and under them a dark moth that has lost half its colour to the weather. Whoever did it knew the road. There is a name scratched beside them, too faded to read, only the letters M and R. I have decided it is a promise rather than a grave. I am going to sleep here tonight with the door bolted, and in the morning I will ride on toward the coast, and if you are reading this at the old house, you may keep the good kettle.

Love, June

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