Side by side, a purple outline stencil and a finished black shaded butterfly tattoo with tribal swirls on the lower back.

Butterfly with tribal swirls before and after

Back · Black and grey · Photo

The left panel shows a purple outline of a butterfly with tribal swirls and a short script word on one wing. The right panel shows the finished version in solid black linework with shaded wings and flowing tribal curves. The two photographs are framed together to compare the outline stage with the completed design on bare skin.

Back Butterfly Tribal Swirl Script Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At ten past three the ward on the fourth floor went quiet in the way Bea liked best, the monitors ticking like a clock somebody had forgotten to wind. She had a stack of charts on the trolley and a pencil behind her ear, and in the top drawer of the empty side room lay the sketch Mr Hollis had asked her to keep safe. It was a butterfly in blue biro, outlined twice, its wings curling into long tribal swirls that ran off the edge of the paper like smoke.

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"It isn't finished," he had said that afternoon, tapping the word written across the lower wing. "Ruby does the colour. I only do the lines." Ruby was his daughter, who lived in Leeds and rang at nine, and who had promised to drive down on Sunday with the box of paints he could no longer lift. Bea had asked nothing else. She had learned on nights that people told you the important part when the lights were low.

At four she went back to him. He was awake, watching the window where the car park lamps made the rain look like thread. She held the paper up against the glass and he traced the swirls with one finger in the air, slow, the way a man rehearses a route home. "Start with the black," he said. "Then the wings. You can't colour a thing you haven't drawn properly."

By the time the sky went grey over the bins, Bea had photocopied the sketch twice and pinned one copy above the sink in the staff room, where nobody would move it. The other she folded into her pocket for Sunday, when Ruby would come up the stairs with the paints. Mr Hollis was asleep by then, one hand open on the blanket, the name still legible on the wing in his careful, slanting capitals.