Colour tattoo of a swallowtail butterfly above a red sofa inside an ornate oval frame, in neo-traditional style on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly and sofa in an ornate frame

Neo-trad · Calf · Colour · Photo

An oval ornate picture frame contains a swallowtail butterfly above a red sofa on green grass, with a small card reading RIOT! in the lower section. The linework is bold and dark, with the frame carrying decorative scrollwork and the scene using soft gradient shading in teal, green and red. The composition is centred and the design fills the frame of the photograph.

Neo-trad Calf Butterfly Grass Sky

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The removal men had the sofa out on the pavement before anyone noticed the frame was still hanging above it, and by then the butterfly had moved. Gil swore it had been on the left wing when he lifted the picture off the nail, but now it sat on the right, fanning its orange panels over the red cushion as if it had paid for the seat.

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The solicitor wanted everything itemised. He had a clipboard, a chewed biro and no patience for a painted oval in a gilt frame. 'Lounge wall, one picture, decorative,' he said, and Gil turned the thing over to find the backing board held a card gone the colour of weak tea. Someone had printed RIOT across it in thick black capitals, and beneath that, in careful pencil, the words: the green is for the street.

Mrs Okonedo had told him about the sofa on his first visit. Her husband, Ade, had dragged it onto the grass outside the housing office in 1984 and sat on it for eleven days while the bailiffs argued with him through the railings. The council gave up in the end. The grass never grew back properly, and the sofa never went back indoors until the day they hung the picture above it.

The butterfly lifted off the canvas, drifted down the hall past the coat hooks, and settled on the open front door. Gil watched it go. He wrote decorative on the form, looked at the word for a while, crossed it out, and wrote the other one.