Black and grey traditional tattoo of a butterfly, a bird with spread wings and roses across the ribs and side of a torso.

Butterfly, bird and roses on the ribs

Traditional · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large black and grey tattoo covers the side of the torso, with a butterfly on the left, a bird with spread wings on the right, and several roses and leaves between them. The linework is bold and the shading uses solid black with grey tones on the wings and petals. The photo shows a person lying on a white bed in a black thong, with a grey fabric draped over the lower body, and the tattoo fills the centre of the frame.

Traditional Botanical Ribs Butterfly Bird Wing Rose Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rose garden at Hollin Keep had been walled for three hundred years, and in all that time no hawk had been allowed past the gate. My grandmother kept the iron key on a cord round her neck. She told me the only creature that ever got inside uninvited was a grey moth that came each summer to the sundial and left again before the first frost.

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The summer I turned sixteen, the king's falconer lost his best bird, a black-winged goshawk called Sorrel, and she came down over the south wall in a rush of wind with her talons out, straight at the moth. I thought the moth was finished. Instead it lifted off the warm stone, and the hawk folded her wings and dropped beside it. For the length of a breath they were the same colour, dark against pale, circling the roses together.

The falconer came at dusk with a leather hood and a silver bell. I had the key in my hand, and I did not open the gate. I told him the bird had never been here, that I had seen nothing but petals and shadow. He was old and tired. He looked past me at the bushes for a long moment, then nodded and walked away down the gravel path.

Sorrel never returned to the mews. Even now, some evenings I find the moth resting on the sundial, and in the bed of thorns there is a single black feather that nobody planted. My grandmother was right about the walls. She was only wrong about who they were built to keep out.