Black and grey butterfly and ornamental tattoo stacked down the centre of a woman's back, seen in a black and white photograph.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly stack down the spine

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with her hair tied up sits with her back to the camera, her head turned down and her face not visible. A vertical column of tattoos runs along her spine, mixing shaded butterflies with fine-line swirling ornaments, and the motifs shrink as they descend. The photograph is monochrome, so the black ink and grey shading are shown against a plain, softly lit background.

Back Butterfly Swirl Ornament Spine Flourish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every Saturday the dance hall at Cobble Ferry filled with lamp smoke and the sound of Tobias Rudd's fiddle, and every Saturday the moths came down from the rafters to see who was dancing. Nobody remarked on it. The moths were the old folk's sign that the floor was sound and the band was in tune.

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The year the flood took the bridge, a girl called Nell Ashdown came up the lane with a tin box and a bad cough. She sat by the door sewing ribbons onto her skirt, and when the fiddler stopped to rest she hummed his tune back to him note for note, so the moths turned in slow circles above her head like small grey lanterns. Tobias asked her to stay the winter. She said she would stay as long as the moths did.

On the last night before the river rose again, the moths did not come down. Tobias lifted his bow and found the floor bare under a ceiling of dark beams. Nell took the lamp from its nail, walked to the wall by the door, and began to paint. She drew a wing, then a smaller wing below it, then smaller still, a stair of swirling ornament running down the plaster until it reached the skirting board. When she finished, the moths came down one by one to settle on the painted wings, as if the wall had been a branch all along.

The dance went on until the lamp burned out. In the morning the water had taken the lane and Nell was gone with her tin box. Tobias never learned where. But the wall by the door kept its stair of wings, and for years afterwards the dancers who came to Cobble Ferry touched the lowest one for luck before they took the floor.