Black and grey butterfly tattoo on the upper back, with its wings breaking up into flying bird silhouettes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly dissolving into birds on upper back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey butterfly sits on the upper back, with its left wing broken into a scatter of flying bird silhouettes that drift up and to the right. The wings use solid black fills with soft grey shading and pale highlights, while the body is shaded with a smooth grey gradient. The composition is open, with the butterfly on the left and the birds fading into the skin on the right.

Blackwork Back Butterfly Bird Flock Wing Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down before the kettle goes cold, and mind the nets, they're still wet from Tuesday. No, the other chair. Right. You want to know why Dunmore men won't whistle at sea? It's the butterfly. My grandfather swore it came off the hill in the spring of the bad year, a black and grey thing with wings like a window with the light gone out, and it settled on the bow of the Good Intent while she lay against the harbour wall.

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Nobody paid it much heed. Men don't, with a boat to tar and a skipper who wants his tea. But when the Intent went out past the Skerries that October, the wind swung round and the sky went thick, and the butterfly lifted off the rail and opened its wings, and the wings came apart. Each piece turned into a bird. Gulls, shags, a few terns, black against the grey, fifty or sixty of them, all flying up and to the right, away from the sea as if the sea had said something rude. My grandfather said they circled the mast three times and then went towards the coast, and the boat came home on a sea that should have sunk her.

The skipper, Tom Haskey, wouldn't say a word about it after. He just nailed a scrap of canvas over the wheelhouse, painted black, and told the lads that whatever leaves a boat is not ours to keep. My grandfather said it was the only sensible thing anyone ever said aboard her.

Last summer I found that canvas in the shed, gone soft as cloth, with a brown moth dead on it. I took it down to the harbour and let the wind have it. Mind your cup, now. It's hot.