Fine line geometric butterfly tattoo in black ink across the upper back, with faceted wings built from straight lines.

Geometric butterfly on the upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink butterfly is drawn in thin, straight lines on the upper back of a person whose hair is pulled up at the nape. The wings are divided into triangles and polygons, giving a faceted, origami-like form, with a narrow body and two antennae at the centre. The skin is pale and softly lit against a dark background, and the tattoo is the clear focus of the composition.

Fine line Geometric Back Butterfly Wing Insect Line Polygon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody aboard the Harrowgate ate a biscuit without first asking whether I had folded the tray card beneath it. I had been the cook's mate for three years, and the habit was mine alone: every greasy order slip that came down from the wardroom I creased into thirds, then sixths, then opened again along the diagonals until the paper remembered the shape of a wing. Chief Dunmore called it a waste of good pencil. The stewards called it fidgeting. I called it keeping my hands away from the bread knife when the sea got up.

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Eleven days out of Cardiff the weather turned hard, and the galley became a place of skidding pans and scalded wrists. Dunmore went down the scuttle with a broken ankle on the third night, which left me to get the officers' breakfast onto the tables without a chief to bellow at me. Everything paper was soaked through except the menu cards in the tin drawer. I wrote the day's soup on the back of one, folded it into a rough butterfly, and found my hands were steadier with something to do than without.

On the fourth morning the sea lay down flat as a tablecloth, and Ruddock, the second mate, came in for his coffee. He was a thin man who never looked at anyone directly. He saw the card beside the urn, lifted it, and unfolded it with his thumbnail, slowly, as though the wing might tear. 'My mother made these on the nursery table,' he said. 'Diagonals first, then the body. She said paper never lies about a crease.' He tucked it inside his oilskin and said nothing more.

That afternoon, when the steward came for the trays, there was a brass hook screwed into the galley beam that I had never noticed before. Hanging from it was a fresh butterfly cut from a chart margin, its lines as sharp as the day they were drawn. Ruddock had left it there for me. Dunmore, limping in on his crutch, looked up at it for a long time and said nothing about pencil at all.