Four coloured butterflies with shaded wings spread across the side of a person's ribs, in orange, blue, lavender and red.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four butterflies on the ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

Four butterflies of different sizes are tattooed across the side of the ribcage, with the largest in lavender near the centre and smaller ones in orange and black, blue, and red. Each wing has dark outlines and soft shading that gives it some depth. The butterflies are spaced diagonally across the skin against a plain background of bare torso and a blue top at the upper left.

Ribs Butterfly

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the rail, and keep your hands off that lamp, for I'll not tell it twice. Sixty-one days out of Valparaiso and the Mary Ellen had not seen a single bird since the Horn. So when the first butterfly came tumbling over the bow, the mate swore it was a scrap of sailcloth caught in the wind.

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It was lavender, as big as a man's palm, and it went round the mainmast three times before it settled on the coil of the halyard. Cook came up from the galley with his ladle to see what the fuss was about. Then came a little blue one, then a black and orange one that dropped onto the spare canvas and folded its wings shut like a prayer book. Nobody counted the days after that.

The last was red, and smaller than the rest, and it came in low over the water as though it had been flying a long way on nothing but spite. It landed on the back of the young steersman's hand. His name was Tobias Greer, and he had been crying into his oilskin because his mother had died in Bristol and no letter had yet come to tell him so.

By morning the wind swung north and we made Falmouth in a week. Tobias kept that red one pressed between two pages of his Bible, and when the harbourmaster asked what the ship carried, he said four butterflies and a great deal of weather. The clerk wrote it down as the only honest entry in the log.