Black and grey traditional-style tattoo of a butterfly, a swallow and roses across the side of the torso and hip.

Butterfly, swallow and roses on the side torso

Traditional · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A woman lies on a bed in black underwear, showing a large black and grey tattoo across her side and hip. The design combines a detailed butterfly with wings marked by lace-like patterns, a swallow with spread wings, and several shaded roses with leaves. The shading is smooth and the linework is bold, with the tattoo filling the centre of the frame.

Traditional Ribs Butterfly Swallow Bird Rose Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallow came back to the cut the week the ice went off the lock gates, and Abel Crane said that was no coincidence. Nothing on the Trent came back on time without a reason. He stood on the towpath with his cap in his hands while his wife unloaded the last of the coal. Ada had painted roses on every cabin door they owned, and she would not let him sell the Lantern Moth, though the cargo had gone to pay the lock dues twice over.

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Ada's grandmother had told her that a swallow nesting on a boat was a promise the water would keep you, and a butterfly on the hull was a soul that had slipped a drowned man and wanted a dry bed. Abel laughed at both. Then he went below and found the chart table covered in her pencil drawings, moths with lace on their wings, and he stopped laughing.

In the hard month the Trent froze to the reeds. They were stuck at Torksey with no coal and two children asleep under the hatch boards. On the third night Ada climbed onto the roof in her stockings and sat with her back to the chimney. The swallow had gone south in October and was not there. Something else was: a dark bird with its wings held wide over the water, lit by the lantern in the window. It flew the length of the frozen cut and came back, and where it had passed the ice showed black and thin.

They poled through at dawn. Abel never sold a boat with a moth on her again. The roses faded on the doors, and every spring the swallow came back to the same nail under the roof.