Black and grey footprint tattoo with a small orange monarch butterfly and swirling script-like linework on the side of the ribs.

Footprints and butterfly on the ribs

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

Two shaded footprints sit in the centre of the design, with swirling black linework above and below them. A small orange monarch butterfly is placed beside the lower footprint. The footprints use grey shading and the linework is bold and black, with colour used only on the butterfly.

Ribs Footprint Butterfly Monarch butterfly Swirl Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pavement outside Pell's bakery is still soft when you reach it, a grey skin of cement the foreman swore he'd let set by two. Someone has been before you. Two small prints run from the kerb to the shop door, toes pressed deep, heels barely touched, and then they stop as though the walker had been lifted clean off the street. You are the night inspector for the council works, which means you are paid to notice things like this and to write them down.

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You know the story already, because everyone on Tanner Street knows it. In the winter of the bad frost, Ruth Pell's youngest slipped out in her nightdress to see the bread come out of the oven, and the cold took her before anyone thought to look. Her father poured the step himself the following spring and would not let anyone lay a tile over it. The ironwork gate beside it still curls its black scrolls up towards the lamp, the same loops and tails you see stamped on every bakery tin in the window.

You kneel with your torch and reach for the edge of the nearest print, meaning only to smooth the lip so the rain won't blur it. Then a monarch comes down out of the dark, orange as a struck match, and settles on the rim of the second footprint as lightly as a word settling on a page. It opens and closes its wings. You stay very still, the way you would for a child.

You don't smooth anything. You stand, take out your notebook, and write the time, twelve minutes past three, and under it: prints to be left as found. In the morning the whole street will walk around them, and nobody will ask why.