Small butterfly tattoo with black swirled linework wings and a pink and blue ribbon forming the body, on pale skin at the lower back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly with pink and blue ribbon

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A small butterfly tattoo sits on pale skin, drawn with loose black swirling linework that forms the wings and antennae. The body is a ribbon shape filled with pink on one side and blue on the other, with soft shading at the edges. The tattoo is centred in the frame, with the top edge of a dark patterned waistband visible at the bottom right.

Back Butterfly Ribbon Awareness ribbon Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The woad vat had gone sour again by the time Oriel came up the lane, and she was already swearing in the dye-yard dialect, which meant the madder had caught on the bottom of the copper and the whole batch would smell of scorched onions. I told her to leave the silk and bring the lamp instead. She did not thank me. Nobody ever thanked me for being right about dye.

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We had two bolts of cloth on the racks that morning, one to be the rose-pink of the madder root and one the deep blue of woad leaves, and the widow on Salt Street had paid in advance for a ribbon of each, sewn edge to edge. Her son had gone out with the grain ships to Alexandria and not come back, and she wanted something she could knot to the gate post where the wind would take it. I cut the strips the length of my forearm, dipped them in turn, and hung them to dry from the beam.

That was when the butterfly came in through the shutter, pale as lint, and settled on the wet blue strip as though it had been ordered. Its wings opened and closed slowly while the dye ran into the creases of its body. Oriel went to shoo it and I stopped her, because the stain was already spreading into fine black swirls along its edges, the way a careful hand would draw them. When the butterfly lifted off, it left its shape pressed into the silk, and the ribbon's edge looked like a line of handwriting nobody had taught it.

The widow came at dusk and held the ribbon up against the last light. She turned it over twice before she spoke. Then she asked whether the mark was meant to be there, and I said I did not know, which was the truth. She tied it to the gate with a double knot and stood under it until the blue had gone grey in the dark.