Coloured pencil drawing of a green, blue and brown butterfly above black swirling vines and green leaves, shown as a tattoo design rather than on skin.

Butterfly and swirling vine design

Colour · Flash

The drawing shows a butterfly with its wings partly open, shaded in green, blue, brown and yellow with white spots on the edges. Below it, black scrolling vines curl outwards and downwards, with small green leaves placed along the stems. The design is drawn in coloured pencil on a plain pale background, with the butterfly as the focal point and the swirls balancing the composition.

Butterfly Vine Swirl Leaf Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The trellis had gone up three days before the wedding, and Dad would have said it was lopsided, which is why I tied the last tendril myself at six that morning, standing on an upturned crate in the rectory garden with dew soaking through my slippers. The black curls were his idea, copied from a pencil sketch he kept in a biscuit tin in the shed. The florist had tucked small green leaves along the stems as though the whole thing had grown there overnight.

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Nobody had planned for a butterfly. Mum muttered that insects were bad luck at outdoor ceremonies, though she had said the same about the wasps. At twenty past two, while Priya read her vows in a voice that kept catching on the word always, a wing the colour of pond water and new lime came down out of the cherry blossom and settled on the highest curl of the trellis. It opened and closed slowly, the brown edges catching the sun like wet slate, and forty people forgot to breathe at once.

I knew that wing. I had seen it a hundred times in the tin, shaded in with the same blue pencil Dad had worn down to a stub, the same white dabs along the edge that he had pressed in with the tip of a paintbrush handle. He drew it the summer before he went into hospital, and he told me he was saving it for something worth the trouble. Priya's laugh broke through the silence, and the whole garden breathed out with her.

The butterfly stayed through the rings, through the vicar's joke about the weather and the eldest cousin's sneeze, and only lifted when Priya's hand closed over Tom's. It rose over the wall in one slow beat, the way Dad's drawing always seemed to promise, and Mum, for once, said nothing at all.