Small black fine line butterfly tattoo on the nape of a person's neck, with hair pulled up and a hand visible at the top left.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly on the nape of the neck

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small butterfly with outlined, symmetrical wings and a slim dark body sits on the nape of the neck. The linework is thin and even, with the wings drawn as open outlines and little or no solid shading. The photograph is black and white, with the hair and a striped top framing the tattoo at the centre of the frame.

Fine line Neck Butterfly Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ration slips came back from the galley smelling of onion again, which meant Oyelaran had been using the backs of my drawings to wrap the soy cakes. I smoothed the last one flat on the bench under the dim strip light and started over. Wings first, always wings, two open outlines that never quite touch the body. The chart in the seed archive showed the creature with its wings pinched shut, but my grandmother's copy, the one with the coffee ring, held them open, and she said that was how you knew it was flying and not just waiting.

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Nobody on the Halvard has seen one alive. The bio-deck was sealed before my father was born, and the last colony moth was pinned in a case that the scrubbers outlasted by a decade. Still, the children ask. Pell, who is six and sticky with fruit paste, wants one drawn on her hand in felt pen, and I tell her the pen is for numbers. She says numbers are for grown-ups and a butterfly is for keeping.

So on the third shift I took the good nib from the purser's desk and inked the thinnest line I could manage. No shading, because the old drawings never bothered with shadow; the insect was dark enough without help. The body became a single slim stroke, a stitch of ink down the middle, and I mirrored the wings so exactly that I had to fold the slip and rub it with my thumb to be certain.

When the lights dimmed for night cycle, I pressed the slip against the cold steel of the hatch, just to see. The ink had bled a faint reversed shape onto the metal, and Pell, who had followed me down the corridor in her socks, laughed and asked if it could fly. I told her it could, if the ship let it. Then I folded the drawing into my pocket, where the soy cakes could not reach it.