Enlarged with AI from a smaller original
Butterfly tattoo inside the ear
Other · Colour · Photo
A close-up photograph of a butterfly tattoo on the inner part of an ear, with its wings spread across the concha. The wings have black outlines and shading, filled with bright blue, green, purple and pink ink, with thin dark linework for the veins and antennae. A dark plug earring with a pink stone sits in the lobe below, and dark hair frames the edge of the image.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The Corrigan and Sons Travelling Show had lost its elephant in the winter and its band in the spring, and by the time the wagons reached the mill town of Sallow Bridge there was only Mab left to sell the tickets. She sat in the booth with a tin of pins and a ledger that had no columns left to fill.
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Mab's grandmother had kept butterflies. Not for the crowd, she said, but for the road, because a show with nothing alive in it is only a shed on wheels. Each evening she opened a muslin cage at the back of the big top and let the painted ones go, blue and green as bruised plums, and the children chased them under the canvas until the lamps guttered.
The last cage was empty by Michaelmas. Mab found one wing in the sawdust, dry as a beech leaf, and pressed it flat in the ledger between the debts. The mill foreman came to buy the tent for scrap and stayed to watch the rope hang still. He asked what the show would do now.
Mab told him the truth: they would do what the butterflies did, which was go where the light was. She pulled back the flap at dusk. Something lifted off the sawdust, pale and stubborn, and drifted out over the river toward the mill windows, and nobody in Sallow Bridge ever agreed afterwards whether it had been a moth.
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