Colour tattoo of a child sitting beneath a large red feather with butterflies rising from it, placed on a person's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Child with a red feather and butterflies on upper back

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A seated child, drawn with soft outlines, sits at the bottom of the design with their head bowed. A tall red and orange feather rises from beside the figure and up across the shoulder blade, with small butterflies drifting off its edge and an insect-like shape near the top. The work uses soft red and orange washes with some dark shading, giving a loose, painterly finish on the skin.

Back Child Feather Butterfly Insect Watercolour wash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dye-yard at Cadder Lane smelled of vinegar and crushed beetles, and Nell had been told twice already not to sit on the vat steps. She sat anyway, knees drawn up, watching the red water work its slow way through the wool. Her grandmother said the colour came from insects no bigger than grains of rice, scraped off cactus pads in a far country and sold by the pound to people who wanted their coats to look like sunset. Nell did not believe the cactus part. She believed the feather.

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It had come down from the rafters that morning, long as her forearm, the colour of coals just before they go grey. Nobody in the yard kept a bird that shed like that. She tucked it into her sleeve and carried it up the hill past the tanneries, where the wind was cleaner, and held it out. Butterflies rose from the long grass as if the feather had called them, orange and rust, dozens of them, lifting off its edge and drifting over the chimneys. A dark beetle-shaped moth clung to the fence post and watched her with eyes like pins.

Her grandmother was at the bottom of the lane with the dyer, both of them shouting her name. Nell knew what the dyer wanted. He wanted the feather for a colour he had never managed to fix, a red that would not fade. She looked at it for a long time. Then she opened her hand and let the wind take it, and the butterflies went with it, scattering across the roofs like sparks thrown from a forge. When she came down at dusk her fingers were stained to the second knuckle, and by morning they were clean again, except for one fingertip that stayed the colour of madder for a week.