Large realistic butterfly tattoo in black, grey and red with swirling linework, running down the side of a person's back.

Butterfly with red shading on a back

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large butterfly tattoo covers the side of the back, with its upper wings sweeping up towards the shoulder and its lower wings curling down towards the waistband of jeans. The wings and body are shaded in black and grey with smooth gradients, while the central body area is filled with bold red and highlighted in places. Fine black swirls and tendrils extend from the wing edges and add movement to the composition.

Realism Neo-trad Back Butterfly Swirl Wing Tendril

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The madder vats had been cooling since the morning bell, and Ada Pell still had three bolts of silk to hang before the light went. She pegged the last length on the drying line in the yard behind Cooper's Lane, where the wall kept the wind off and the river smell came over it anyway. Something pale kept bumping against the lamp above the door, a moth the size of a hand, its wings dark at the edges and dusted with grey.

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Her father had told her moths were souls waiting to be asked in. She had never believed him, but she set a saucer of warm water with a pinch of madder on the step, the way he used to, and went back to her stirring. When she looked again the moth was on the rim, its black tendrils fine as hair curling down into the pink water, drinking slowly, the red seeping up its body like dye through a thread.

By morning the creature had gone and the saucer was clean. In its place, on the damp cobbles, lay a strip of silk she had never woven, red as a cut, its border worked in tight black swirls that unpicked themselves when she touched them. The buyer from Norwich came at nine and asked for the usual plain scarlet, and Ada showed him the cloth in the rack, and did not say what she had seen.

She kept the strip folded in her apron pocket for the rest of her life. On warm evenings the dark moths gathered under the lamp, and she set out the saucer for them and never once asked what they wanted in return.