Pink and purple butterfly tattoo with black botanical vine scrolls and leaves across the lower back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly and vine scrolls across the lower back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A butterfly with pink and purple wings, outlined in black and decorated with filigree-style patterns, sits at the centre of the design. Black vines with curling tendrils, leaves and small flower shapes, some filled with purple, extend to the left and right. The linework is bold and the wings are shaded with flat colour, and the image is framed with the grey waistband of a garment across the bottom.

Botanical Back Butterfly Wing Vine Leaves Flower Scroll Tendril

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The butterfly came in on the morning tide, folded inside a coil of tarred rope that old Hesketh had hauled up from the Lady Ann's hold. Nobody saw it land. Mags Tully found it on the sill of the net loft, opening and closing its wings as if it were counting something.

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The harbour wall at Porthkell was wreathed in bindweed and wild vine, and the children said the vines grew in the shapes of the old stories. Mags knew only that the leaves went black after the first frost and the small flowers inside them shone violet when the sun came low. She tied a thread to the butterfly's leg, as her grandmother had taught her to do with swallows, and let it go towards the headland.

Each evening after that the butterfly came back to the loft with a new curl of vine caught in its wings, and each evening Mags unpicked the tendril and laid it along the sill. By the end of the month there were three long scrolls of it, and the boats going out past the light found the water quieter wherever the leaves had been laid on the slipway.

When the Lady Ann sailed again in spring, her skipper took a single scroll aboard and came home through the fog without touching a rock. Mags never learned whose promise had been kept. The butterfly stayed in the loft, and the vines kept climbing the harbour wall, dark at the stem and purple at the tips where the light caught them.