Four shaded colour butterfly tattoos spread across a woman's bare upper back, with orange, red and teal wings.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four butterflies across a back

Back · Colour · Photo

Four butterflies are tattooed across the upper and mid back of a woman photographed from behind, with her face and head out of frame. Each butterfly has soft, dimensional shading along the wings, with fine dark antennae and body lines. The wings blend orange, red, teal and dark grey ink, and the butterflies are arranged in a loose diagonal across the skin.

Back Butterfly Wing Antennae

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp room at Hetton Drift smelled of paraffin and wet wool, and Ada Pell had been scrubbing the same brass check for ten minutes when the first butterfly came in on the cage draught. It was a red admiral, torn at one edge, and it settled on the counter beside the tally board as if it had booked a place.

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Her father would have told her to shoo it out. He had been dead since March, of the chest, and the lamp room had gone quiet without his cough behind the partition. She watched the wings open and close, the orange gone to rust, the dark edges fraying like old lace. Then a second came down the shaft, then a third, a pale teal one with a grey hem, and a fourth that bumped against the lamp glass and flew on.

By the end of the back shift there were four of them stitching the air above the rack of Protector lamps, drifting towards the winding house as though somebody on the surface had called them up out of the coal. Mr Rawlinson from the office came down with a torch, swore, and went back up for his tea without looking twice.

Ada propped the lamp-room door open at the top of the stairs. By morning the racks were full and the counter was bare, but the first cage came up with four pale scraps of wing caught on its grille, orange and teal and red, and she pressed them flat inside the back of her tally book before the bell rang.