Digital flash design of a rainbow butterfly, outlined and filled stars and black swirling linework on a white background, with no body placement shown.

Butterfly and stars design with swirls

Mixed · Flash

The design shows a rainbow tie-dye butterfly on a black curling line, with a large rainbow star at the top and smaller stars in black, outline and glowing colour scattered along the swirls. Thin black linework forms the scrolls and star outlines, while the filled stars and butterfly wings use bright rainbow and glow effects. The composition is a tall vertical arrangement on a plain white background.

Butterfly Star Swirl Scroll Rainbow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth had given up on the ewe by the time the butterfly came down out of the hedge. It was the wrong month for butterflies, the frost still white on the gate latch at four in the afternoon, and it sat on the wire of the lambing pen with its wings going like a prism someone had dropped in paint. Colours slid across it in bands, green into violet, orange into the blue of a gas ring. Her brother Tom, who never looked at anything he could not fix, stopped with the bucket in his hand and said, "That's not real."

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"Neither's the lamb," Ruth said, though it was, and was breathing, and that was the whole argument of the afternoon.

The stars came after the light went. Not the sky's stars, which were still hiding behind cloud over Hollin Fell, but small ones, painted and filled, that drifted down off the dark barn roof and settled on the snow in curling lines like the loops a child makes with a sparkler. Ruth followed them to the trough. The biggest, a star with a spiral in its middle like a fingerprint of rainbow water, had caught on the ice and would not come loose.

She knelt and breathed on it. It warmed to a soft green and then gave up its grip, and when she lifted it the whole field tilted, the swirls rising after it like a ribbon pulled from a drawer. Tom was counting lambs in the barn. She did not call him. Some things, she thought, were for whoever got up early enough to find them, and the butterfly had chosen her by staying.