Close view of a small black silhouette butterfly tattoo cluster on a person's upper back near the shoulder blade and neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly silhouettes on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A person's bare upper back is shown from behind, with hair pulled up on one side. Three small solid black butterfly silhouettes, one larger and two smaller, drift upwards towards the neck. The ink is a flat, uniform black against warm, slightly dim skin tones, with a plain dark background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Grandad cut his butterflies from the lid of a tea chest, and he never used scissors. He used the blade of his penknife, folding the card in half and working slowly while the Mary Ann sat against the lock gate at Sonning with her engine ticking as it cooled. I was nine and bored, and I watched the black shapes come away one at a time, their wings pinched at the body so they could stand upright on my palm.

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Every evening that summer he told me the same thing: the big one goes first, then the two little ones, because they follow whoever leads them. I thought it was nonsense until the lock-keeper's wife came down the towpath with a basket of plums and asked if we had any spare card, because her grandson wanted to chase the wasps off the jam. Grandad gave her the whole lid and charged her a plum for each butterfly, and she paid him in full.

He died in March, in the wheelhouse, with the radio playing the shipping forecast. The tea chest lid was still hanging on the cabin wall where he'd left it. My father wanted the barge sold at Reading before the mooring fees went up, and I said nothing, because there was nothing to say that he hadn't already heard.

I took the lid to the stern on the last evening and cut three shapes, one large and two small, working as slowly as he had. The wind came up off the water meadows and lifted them out of my hand. The big one went first, and the two small ones tilted after it over the poplars, dark against the sky, as if someone had already told them where to go.

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