Black linework butterfly tattoo with red shading and swirling flourishes on the outer side of a limb.

Butterfly with red swirls on a limb

Other · Mixed · Photo

A stylised butterfly sits at the centre of the design, with its wings outlined in bold black linework and filled with red and pale highlights. Black and red swirls, teardrop shapes and small dots extend from the wings in a flowing, asymmetrical arrangement. The red shading is soft and fairly even, and the composition fills the frame vertically against the skin.

Other Butterfly Wing Swirl Flourish Dot Flame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost had got into the pump again, so Nell Hadley broke the skin of ice with the back of the hatchet and carried two pails across the yard before the light came up grey over Sallow Fold. The hens were complaining in the shed. Behind her the farmhouse kitchen was still dark, and she could hear her father's cough through the shut pantry window, dry as a gate on a wet hinge.

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Her father had shaped half the iron on Sallow Fold himself, back when the forge still had a fire worth the name. Every latch, every gate, the curling hinge on the dairy door. He liked the swirls best, the ones that doubled back on themselves like smoke. Last week he had asked her to fetch the old tobacco tin from the mantel, the one with the painted lid, and he had turned it over in his fingers for a long time before giving it back to her without a word.

The lid showed a butterfly in black lines, its wings filled with red like the inside of a cut plum, with pale teardrops at the bends and small dots rising off it like sparks. Nell had always thought it looked ready to fly out of the tin. Now it looked like it was waiting for a fire.

She carried it down to the forge after the milking, past the frozen trough and the stacked hurdles. The embers were banked under grey ash. She raked them open, and the bellows gave one wheeze and then a long, steady breath, and the coals came up orange. She did not put the tin on them. She took the old strap of iron from the nail above the bench and bent it into a new hinge, following the lines of the lid until the swirls sat true, and she quenched it in the trough with a hiss that made the hens go quiet. In April the first small tortoiseshell came down out of the hedge and settled on the new hinge, red and black with the frost gone, and it stayed there long enough for her father to see it from the window and lift his hand.