Black and white photo of a person's bare back with a vertical column of butterfly tattoos running down the spine.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly column tattoo down the spine

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph shows a person seen from behind with their head bowed and hair tied up. A vertical column of black butterfly and moth designs runs down the centre of the back, with the largest butterfly near the middle and smaller motifs above and below it. The tattoos use fine linework with shading in the wings, and the soft monochrome lighting keeps the focus on the spine.

Back Butterfly Moth Spine Ornament Swirl

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last train before the line closed for engineering went through at twenty past eleven, and by then the platform lamp at Hollin Bridge had gathered its usual crowd. I swept the moths off the glass with the back of my glove, the way Mr Ashworth taught me forty years back, and watched them settle on the enamel shade in a column, one above another, neat as hymn numbers on a board.

Keep reading

Ashworth kept the halt before me and had a theory about them. Moths go where the light is, he said, and the light goes where the line goes, so if you want to know where a railway is headed, look at what has collected on its lamps. He kept a ledger of them, pinned in cigar boxes in the booking office, with pencilled names under each wing. I never had the patience to keep it up after he died, but I still think of his theory whenever the big ones come down.

Tonight the bell rang from Crossley. The freight was held there, a fallen ash across the cutting, and nothing would come through before morning. I wrote it in the register, initialled it, and stood under the lamp with nothing to do. The largest moth, the one with a pair of pale eyes on its wings like a pair of spectacles, had come down from the top of the column and settled on the signal cabinet by my elbow. It sat very still while the wind worried at the shelter door.

I thought about Ashworth's boxes and the blank card I had never filled in. Then I took the pencil from behind my ear, wrote the date and Hollin Bridge, 11.40, held by weather under a moth I could not name, and switched off the lamp. The column went dark with it, all but the one on the cabinet, which stayed pale on the white paint long after the others had gone, like a note left on a table until the first train whistled up the valley.