Colour butterfly tattoo with black scrollwork and dotwork flourishes across the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Colourful butterfly with scrollwork on the side

Dotwork · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A butterfly with red, orange, teal and pink wings sits at the centre of the design, with black ornamental scrolls curling outwards and upwards from it. Fine black dotted lines and swirls trail down towards the hip, and small coloured accents appear among the scrolls. The photograph is taken from the side, showing the tattoo across the ribs against a plain skin background and red patterned fabric.

Dotwork Ribs Butterfly Swirl Scroll Flourish Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dyer's boy came up Coldharbour Lane on the last Thursday of June with a bolt of silk over his shoulder, and Nan Holloway met him at the bakery door with flour to her elbows. Nobody in Thistlewick had ever bought red from the dyers unless it was wanted for a funeral or a wedding. She took the cloth anyway and paid him in cut loaves.

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That night she sat by the range and cut the silk into wings: a band of madder, a band of woad gone green at the edges, and a slip of pink from the foxglove water her mother had kept in a brown jar. Her husband Tom had wrought the iron gate at the end of the lane, all curled leaves and scrolls, and she sewed her stitches to match, one loop after another, until the thread ran out before the light did.

On the first morning of August a butterfly was sitting on the gatepost. Nobody had seen it arrive. Its wings were the colours of her stitching and its feelers were the fine black lines of Tom's ironwork. When the baker's cat put up a paw, it lifted off without any fuss and drifted down the lane, trailing dots of gold like a pen that hadn't finished writing.

Nan followed it to the stile at Hobb's Field, where it turned once above her head and settled on her wrist. She did not brush it off. She went back to the bakery, rolled out the dough for the Sunday loaves, and found, when she came to shape the last one, that the flour on her hands had taken on a faint pink shimmer. The gate, when she looked, had sprouted a single new loop of scrolling, unfinished, waiting for her to pick up the needle.