Colour neo-trad style butterfly tattoo with yellow, pink and purple wings, swirled black linework and a green ribbon beneath it, on healed skin.

Colour butterfly with green ribbon

Neo-trad · Colour · Photo

A butterfly with outstretched wings and curling black outlines sits on pale skin, with a stylised antenna pair above the body. The wings blend yellow, pink and purple with soft shading, and a green ribbon-like form hangs below the butterfly. Bold black linework and scroll details frame the design against the plain background.

Neo-trad Butterfly Ribbon Swirl Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, shift your feet off those wet cobbles and listen, because the rain won't stop for anybody's dinner. You want the story of the butterfly that came down Saltergate Street the winter the ribbon-seller went blind? Well, she did. Old Ada Pyle sold silks from a striped awning, and every morning she tied a length of green ribbon to the pole so the gulls would know her stall from the fish man's.

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One February a butterfly came in out of the sleet, which no butterfly has any business doing. Its wings were yellow at the edges, bruised pink in the middle and purple where the dark gets in, and every edge curled like a fern unfurling. It settled on the green ribbon and would not leave. Ada felt it with two fingers and laughed. 'You're late for the summer,' she said, 'same as me.'

Each morning after that it came back, and each morning the stallholders argued about whether it was a sign or a nuisance. The fish man swore it was the ghost of his first wife. Ada said the butterfly only wanted somewhere to dry its wings, and a good ribbon was the warmest thing on the whole street.

The rain stopped the week the awning finally came down. Ada was gone, the ribbon was tied to nothing, and when the market men took it down they found it had been knotted into a loop, a little wing shape, with a single dry scale of purple caught in the middle. Nobody ever saw the butterfly again. Only the ribbon, and the bare stall-pole, and the rain falling sideways across Saltergate, the way it does when someone has something left to say.