Flash sheet of butterfly designs: four full-colour butterflies at the top and a grid of black line butterfly designs below, none shown on skin.

Butterfly flash sheet in colour and line

Mixed · Flash

The top half shows four butterflies in full colour, each with bold outlines, shaded wings and bright blue, purple, green, yellow and orange tones. The lower half holds a scattered grid of about thirty black line butterfly designs with varied wing patterns, from simple outlines to ornate filled detail. The white background is plain on both halves, with a soft drop shadow beneath the coloured butterflies.

Butterfly Wing Insect Flash sheet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down where I can see you, and mind the nets, they've not been dried right. Now. You want to know why the blue ones come first. Hush, I'm getting to it. The year your grandfather's boat lost its mast off the Skerry, the sea went flat for three weeks and nothing came up in the nets but weed and old boots. Then one morning the air over the harbour was full of wings, hundreds of them, coming low across the water from the south like sparks blown off a fire.

Keep reading

They were painted, Tam. Bright as enamel. Blue ones with black edges like the lead in a window, purple ones with eyes at the tips, a green and orange pair that looked dipped in lamp oil. Behind them came the thin ones, drawn in pen, lace-winged, so fine you could see the light through. They settled on everything: the nets, the bollards, the gutting table, the bald head of Mr Lusk, who swore at them until they left him be.

Your great-aunt Morag was the one who noticed. She counted the wing patterns, and every one matched a knot somebody on the quay had tied. The double sheet bend, the sheepshank, the wall knot her husband used on the anchor warp. She said the butterflies were the sea's way of showing us the knots we'd forgotten, and she went out the next morning with a pencil and drew them all on the back of a tide table.

The boy must have looked doubtful, because she laughed. Look, she said, and turned the paper over. In the corner was a small line butterfly with its wings folded like a sail, and beneath it, in her hand, the words tied off here. Out past the Skerry the sea was already greying. Now fetch the kettle, and let me finish before your mother calls you in.