Colour tattoo of a butterfly with pink and red wings outlined in black, trailing black swirls, on the side of the hip above denim jeans.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly and swirls on the hip

Other · Mixed · Photo

A butterfly with pink and red wings, outlined in black with some shading inside the wing panels, sits at the centre of the design. Black fine-line swirls and tendrils extend from both sides of the butterfly across the skin. The photograph is taken at an angle showing the hip area, with blue denim and a leopard-print fabric visible at the edges of the frame.

Other Butterfly Swirl Tendril

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The butterfly came in with the rain on the Tuesday, when Mr Dacre's bell over the haberdasher's door had been clanging all morning for customers who never arrived. It settled on the bolt of cerise silk my mother had been saving for the harvest dance, and she would not let me shoo it out. 'Leave it,' she said. 'Look at the wings. Somebody has painted them with a very fine brush.'

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She was right about the brush. The wings were the colour of rhubarb stewed too long, edged in black like the lead of a good pencil, and when it lifted they left a faint dust on my thumb. Mother traced the curl of the feelers with her needle and said the swirls it trailed behind it on the air reminded her of the ironwork on the old pier at Skegness, the way it ran out and curled back on itself as if it could not decide whether to leave. I told her butterflies did not care about piers. She said that was exactly why they were worth watching.

Mr Dacre sold the silk that afternoon to a woman from Holbeach who wanted it for a wedding. My mother stood at the counter with the empty bolt and said nothing for so long that I thought she was angry. Then she took the scissors from the drawer, cut a length of black velvet ribbon, and stitched a spiral onto the hem of her good blouse, following the curl of the swirl exactly.

The butterfly was gone by the time we locked up, out through the gap in the door where the bell wire ran. I walked home with the rain on my collar and thought how easily a thing could leave you a pattern to keep. At supper she wore the blouse, and when she reached for the salt the black ribbon caught the lamplight like a line of ink drying.