Close photo of a butterfly tattoo in neo-traditional style, with black swirled outlines and wing panels filled in pink, orange, green, blue and purple.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Colourful swirled butterfly tattoo

Neo-trad · Other · Colour · Photo

A butterfly with wings spread wide, outlined in bold black linework with curled scrollwork along the edges and small dots scattered across the wings. The wing panels are filled with flat, slightly textured colour in pink, orange, yellow-green, teal and purple, with a stained-glass feel. The image is a close crop with soft lighting, so the fine detail of the antennae and shading is slightly soft.

Neo-trad Other Butterfly Wing Swirl Antennae Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You want to know about the butterfly. Sit down, then, and mind the cat, she's had her tea but she still thinks she's owed another. That was the winter of fifty-three, when old Eli Pargeter still ran the glass shop on Chapel Street and I was the boy who swept up the offcuts and got his fingers lead-burned for his trouble.

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Nell Kersey came in one wet Thursday with a shoebox of broken glass. Her mother had kept a sweet shop by the canal and when she died the jars went to the rag man, so Nell had rescued what she could. Pink from a cough-drop jar, teal from a medicine bottle, purple from a wine bottle the vicar never admitted to owning. She wanted a butterfly for her back door. Eli looked at the box, then at her, and said the wings would need heavy black lead or the colours would bleed into each other like sugar left out in the rain. She said her mother had used to say the same about barley sugar.

I cut the lead, I soldered the curls at the wingtips until they looked like the ends of a barley twist, and I dotted the panels with little beads of solder so it would catch the light. It took us eleven days. When she came to collect it she didn't pay straight away. She stood in the workshop holding it up to the window, and the light came through all the colours at once, and she said nothing for so long that Eli finally asked if it was wrong.

She hung it in her back door. Some afternoons, when the sun came round low off the canal, a patch of purple lay on the lino in her kitchen, and the cat would chase it from one end of the floor to the other until the light gave out. That's all there is, really. The cat thought it was alive. I'm not sure I ever stopped thinking so either.