Colourful butterfly tattoos in a trail down a woman's back, following the spine with small star and dot accents.

Butterfly trail down the spine

Back · Colour · Photo

A woman's bare back shows a trail of butterflies running down the spine from the upper back towards the lower back. The butterflies vary in size and colour, including orange, blue, purple, green, yellow and red, with dark outlines and soft shading on the wings. Small stars and dots are scattered between them to suggest a sparkling path.

Back Butterfly Star Sparkle Dot Spine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had sealed the inn at Harrow Gill for six days when you first noticed the butterflies. They were pinned along the beam above the back stairs, each no bigger than a thumbprint, cut from thick card and painted so carefully that the wings seemed to shiver whenever the stove drew. Mrs Pell said her husband had made the first one in the winter of the flood, so that guests could find the kitchen without a candle.

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By the third night the trail had grown. A blue one hung near the landing, then a purple one that had lost a wing tip to a draught, then a green one no larger than a barley grain. Between them someone had flicked silver paint from a brush, so the beams looked dusted with frost. You started counting them on the way down to the cellar, and every night there was one more, as if the house were walking downhill ahead of you.

On the seventh morning the pass opened. The carter's boy came in stamping, and the guests began packing with the clatter of people who wanted to be elsewhere. You climbed to the beam to take down the last butterfly, the small red one at the foot of the stairs, and found it was not finished. Its wings were only pencilled in, and a jar of vermilion sat beside it with a brush laid across the rim.

Mrs Pell stood in the doorway with her shawl already on. She nodded at the jar. "Gerald always left the red one for whoever stayed longest," she said. You dipped the brush, and the colour bled into the card the way meltwater finds a crack in the flagstones.