Black and grey butterfly and scrollwork tattoo on the lower back, with shaded butterfly wings and bold swirling linework.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly and scroll tattoo on lower back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A tattoo of two butterflies joined by a long, swirling black scroll with curled flourishes at each end. The butterflies are shaded in grey with darker outlines, while the scrollwork is solid black with bold, even linework. The design sits across the lower back above a waistband, with a hand holding the jeans at the edge of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, sit yourself down by the pump, because you'll not hear this twice. Nineteen fifty-seven, the summer the Hadley fete rained off three years running, old Amos Pell had a forge behind the Feathers and a temper to match the fire. Folk brought him broken hinges and he mended them. Nobody brought him a dream, so when Constance Abbott came up the lane with a pencil drawing of a scroll that curled like a fern gone wild, he laughed and told her iron wasn't paper.

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She stood there with that drawing in her glove and didn't budge. Two butterflies, she said, one for her and one for her brother who went out to Malaya and never wrote. She wanted them on the gate at Lamb Corner so he'd see them coming home.

So Amos bent the bar hot and hammered for a fortnight. The scroll came out black and heavy, with a flourish at each end like a question mark that had changed its mind. The butterflies he would not forge. He cut them from sheet and beat them thin, then riveted them to the scroll with their wings lifted, as if they had just come down to rest.

The gate went up in September. Constance's brother never came through it. The telegram came in October, and Amos took the gate down that same week, meaning to melt it for scrap. He never did. Every spring since, a pair of pale butterflies has come drifting over that wall, and nobody in Hadley will tell you which one is the brother.

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