Close crop of a torso in ripped blue jeans showing a black and grey butterfly tattoo on the lower abdomen above the waistband.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly tattoo above the hip

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A cropped view of a midriff and hip wearing ripped, tie-dyed blue jeans, with a hand holding the waistband. A black and grey butterfly tattoo sits on the lower abdomen, with part of another dark tattoo visible further up the left side. The image is largely greyscale with the jeans picked out in blue, and the plain grey backdrop keeps the focus on the skin and ink.

Other Butterfly Flame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mags had been up the tower stair since before the bells, scraping lichen from the lintel with a butter knife because the trowel had gone down to the village with her father. Below her the castle's broken curtain wall ran to the river, which was low enough that the old ford showed its stones like teeth.

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Her brother had dared her to stay until dusk. He had gone back down with the goats, calling out that the ghost of the last steward would find her sleeping on the wrong side of the hearth. She did not believe in the steward. She believed in the grey moth-wing creature that kept settling on the cold grate, opening and closing its wings as if warming them at a fire nobody had lit in three hundred years.

On the third evening she set a candle stub on the hearthstone and waited. The wind came through the arrow slits and the flame leaned, bent, and stood up straight again. The butterfly dropped out of the dark and landed on the wax lip of the flame, lifted, and came back. She understood that it was not trying to burn, only to stay near the one thing in that cold place that made light.

She left the candle burning when she went down. In the morning the stub was a puddle of wax and the grate was bare, but the lintel she had scraped showed a carved wing, half hidden under the lichen, that no one in the village had ever seen.