Black and grey traditional butterfly tattoo across the lower back, with part of a coloured tattoo visible at the left edge.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly tattoo on the lower back

Traditional · Back · Mixed · Photo

A butterfly with outstretched wings is tattooed centrally on the lower back, shown from behind against a dark top and a red skirt. The wings use bold black outlines, grey shading and white highlights along the veins and panels, with a small pointed body and antennae at the top. A coloured tattoo with orange and red tones is partly visible on the left side of the frame.

Traditional Back Butterfly Wing Antennae Moth

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bus stops outside the closed bookbinders on Lower Briggate at twenty to two, and the driver doesn't look up when you tap your card twice. You take the seat behind the glass partition where the heating still works. Somebody has left a hardback field guide on the seat beside you, open at the swallowtails, and the pages have gone soft from rain.

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Outside, the city keeps its lights on for nobody. A moth goes round the bus shelter bulb in slow loops, wings grey as wet slate, pale stripes running across them like the ribs of an umbrella. You watch it the whole way past the bingo hall and the shuttered Wetherspoons. It lands on the glass beside your reflection and holds still long enough for you to count the panels on its wings. Four on each side, then the dark scalloped edge that looks as if it was cut with pinking shears.

Your sister would know its name. She always knew names. She'd have the thing identified before the bus reached the river, and she'd tell you it was only a hawk moth, nothing to be frightened of, and you'd argue anyway, because you liked the way she said nothing was to be frightened of, as if fright were a coat she could hang on a hook.

The bus pulls into the depot. The moth lifts off the glass, catches the wind from the open doors, and climbs past the floodlights towards the minster spire. You stay seated while the driver switches off the engine and the whole city seems to dim by a notch. You take out your phone and text her one word: swallowtail. Then you get off.