Black and grey butterfly wing tattoo with ornate swirling linework running from the shoulder down the side of a bare back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly wing tattoo down a woman's back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large butterfly tattoo with wide, patterned wings extends from the upper back and shoulder down the side of the torso towards the hip. The design uses black and grey shading with fine swirling outlines and ornamental detail within the wings. The subject is photographed outdoors from behind, with a tree trunk and greenery in the background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cabinet had forty-one drawers, and Hester Vane had opened every one of them before the tide turned at Wells. None held what the solicitor's letter had promised. Each held a moth or butterfly pinned under glass, labelled in a dead man's copperplate, and every pair of wings was painted with grey eyes, spirals and ringed rosettes, as if a silversmith had been paid by the curl.

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The drawer marked Undine was empty except for a length of black silk thread coiled in the corner. She followed it with a fingernail. It ran through a pinhole in the baize, under the runner, and out through the cabinet's back panel, where it was tied in a sailor's bowline to the iron ring on the quay. The boat she had hired was called the Halcyon Dove, and her skipper, a silent man named Ansel Rook, was already coiling the ropes.

They ran north on the ebb with a fair wind through the night. Somewhere past the last light off Wells, Hester lifted the lid to check the pins, and the largest specimen, its wings as wide as her hand, was no longer under the glass. Grey spirals drifted over the gunwale and into the spray. She watched them scatter across the black water like ash that had learnt to swim, and then she saw the thread still knotted to the cabinet, running taut out over the stern.

Rook read the rest from her face and said nothing. At dawn the log recorded one passenger, unclaimed, and a cargo of forty empty frames. Hester wrote the entry herself, in copperplate, because someone had to keep the dead man's hand going.

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