Black ink butterfly with a dotted trail and four-pointed stars on a person's upper back, near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly and stars on a upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink butterfly with outlined wings and filled dark sections sits on the skin, with a dotted line trailing from its wings. Four-pointed stars are scattered around the butterfly and along the dotted path. The work is in solid black ink on a light skin tone, with the design placed diagonally across the upper back.

Back Butterfly Star Dot Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming down on Hollins Row since six, and by half past eight the gutters over the fishmonger's were running like tired taps. I was wrapping the last ribbon reels in newspaper when Tomas from the bric-a-brac stall came splashing up the cobbles with a jam jar pressed against his coat. Something was beating inside it, pale and frantic, and when he tipped it onto my trestle it was not a moth at all but a brooch: a black enamel butterfly with its wings picked out in seed pearls, a crooked trail of dots pricked along its tail like stitching.

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"Found it under the lamp by the bins," he said. "Nobody's going to claim it. Look at the state of it."

I looked. One wingtip was chipped, and several pearls had been swapped for chips of glass by someone who loved it less than whoever first made it. Pinned to the back was a paper tag in faded biro: For Ida, when the stars come out. Ida Marsh had sold me this stall eleven years ago and moved to Whitby to be near her daughter, and she had never once mentioned a brooch.

I took the tram out on Saturday with the jar on my lap, following the dotted route the way the brooch seemed to want, past the chippy and the shuttered bingo hall, to a wind-bitten terrace where a woman in a yellow mac was pegging out a wet sheet. She looked at the pin, then at me, and laughed until she had to sit on the step. "Ida's stars," she said. "She cut them out of a tin ceiling when the fairground closed. Never let anyone wear the butterfly, though. Said it was hers to lose." That evening, back at Hollins Row, the rain thinned to nothing and the puddles caught the streetlamps in small bright points. I pinned the brooch to the awning above my stall, where anyone walking past could see it, and left it there for her to find.