Black and white vintage photograph of four women seen from behind, each with traditional-style tattoos of butterflies, birds and florals on the hips and buttocks.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four women with hip tattoos, vintage photograph

Traditional · Other · Black and grey · Photo

Four women stand in a row seen from behind in a vintage black and white photograph, with their heads cropped out of the frame. Each has tattoos on the hips and buttocks, including butterflies, a swallow and floral or heart motifs in bold outlines with solid shading. The image is monochrome and the women are arranged evenly across the frame against a plain interior with a television set on the right.

Traditional Other Butterfly Swallow Bird Floral Heart

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third night out of Avonmouth the stencil book had gone soft with grease from the stove, and Dot Harvey, who ran the galley on the Carrick Lass, had stopped apologising for it. I kept my tattooing kit in the flour bin, the only place the mate never looked. Nobody paid in money on a coal boat. They paid in favours, and a swallow on the hip was worth a week of peeled potatoes.

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The swallows were the easy ones. Every lad who had rounded the Horn wanted one, and I had drawn the same bird so often I could do it with my eyes shut, and sometimes did, out of boredom and the heat off the range. But the Chandler twins asked for butterflies, and that made me sit up. Two of them, wings open toward the spine, outlines so heavy I had to thin the ink with a drop of brandy to stop it running.

Dot caught me at it on the last night before the Mersey. She looked over my shoulder at the pair, wiped her hands on her apron, and said swallows only meant you'd come back, whereas butterflies meant you'd never once stayed put. Then she took the needle from me and finished the second wing herself, because her hand was steadier than mine on a moving deck.

We came into the river at dawn. The twins walked off the gangplank without a word, each with her wings folded under her coat, and Dot scrubbed the stove top as though nothing had happened at all.