Black filigree butterfly tattoo with a blue and pink ribbon at its centre, on a person's upper back below the shoulder blade.

Filigree butterfly with ribbon on upper back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A butterfly made of black scrolling filigree wings sits on the upper back, with a blue and pink ribbon forming its body at the centre. The wings are outlined in bold black linework with swirls inside, and soft grey shading gives the wings depth. The ribbon is filled with flat blue and pink colour, which stands out against the black and grey of the design and the skin.

Back Butterfly Ribbon Scroll Filigree Swirl Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lacemaker of Hollin Ash kept her bobbins in a cedar box at the edge of the wood, where the last cottage leaned against the beeches. When her two girls were small she gave each one a spool, blue for the elder and pink for the younger, and told them to wind thread into the trees until the light failed. Nobody in the village thought this strange. Nobody in the village went into the beeches after dusk either.

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One evening the younger girl's pink thread snagged on a bramble and would not come free, so her sister knelt in the leaf mould and tied her blue thread to it, knot after knot, so that neither of them could be lost without the other. The wood, which had never been kind to anyone, grew quiet and let them walk out at first light, their hands raw and their threads bound together in the middle.

The lacemaker sat at her loom all that night with the candle guttering. At dawn she found the threads lying across the sill, and where the knot was tied they had grown into lace, black and scrolled at every edge, with wings spread wide enough to cover a thumbnail. She did not unpick it. She set it in the window and went back to her bobbins.

Each spring, when the beeches come into leaf, a butterfly with wings like her finest work settles on that sill. It stays until the sun has warmed the blue and pink knot in its middle, then drifts back into the wood, carrying both colours with it.