Close photograph of a pink and black butterfly with black vine linework and small letters on the side of a torso, tattooed on the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly and vines on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A pink and grey shaded butterfly sits among black vine linework that curls across the side of the torso, with a few pink accent lines in the swirls. Two single letters appear within the vines, and the butterfly has soft shading on its wings. The image is a close, well-lit crop of the midriff and ribs against a light background, with a navel piercing visible.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, the band's having a breather and I've got the floor till they're back. You want the story of the Silver Lantern? Right. Nineteen thirty-something, the ballroom above the Pier Hotel in Margate, the sprung floor still bouncing from the Saturday before. A girl called Dorothy Penhale came in wearing one shoe that didn't match the other, and she danced every dance with the same lad, Percy Vane, who couldn't tell a foxtrot from a fox.

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Now Percy had a habit. Every time he turned her under his arm, he'd trace a little curl in the air with two fingers, as if he were drawing vine round a trellis. Dorothy said it was the most ridiculous thing she'd ever seen. She said it at every dance, and she said it smiling.

Then the night the power failed, the lamps went out, and somebody flung open the French windows to let the heat off. In came a butterfly, pink as a sugar mint and dusted grey at the edges, and it went straight for the middle of the floor. Nobody moved. It circled the pair of them twice, landed on Percy's sleeve, and stayed there while the band tuned back up.

Percy swore he'd whistled that very tune on the pier the week before, and that the butterfly must have followed it in. Some say a butterfly can't carry a tune. I'm not one to argue with a butterfly. He asked her to marry him at the second chorus, and she said yes before the next dance had finished.

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