Colour tattoo of a green butterfly and a purple butterfly with black tribal swirls on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Green and purple butterflies with tribal swirls on a back

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The tattoo shows a green butterfly with spotted wings and a purple butterfly, both linked by sweeping black tribal-style lines that curl up from the bottom edge to the top. The butterflies have solid colour fills with darker outlines, while the tribal flourishes are bold solid black. The design sits diagonally across the upper back against pale skin, with the purple butterfly lower left and the green one upper right.

Back Butterfly Tribal Swirl Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ada Corrigan had kept the dye vats at Halliwell's works for thirty-one years, and she still tasted the copper in the back of her throat each morning when she came through the gate. The new apprentice, a lanky boy called Tom Frith, thought the purple was the easy part. He had been sent to fetch the crushed shells from the cold store, and he came back with his sleeves rolled and his fingers stained the colour of plums.

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"Purple's for kings," Ada said, not looking up from the copper pan. "Green's for the ones who have to live with the kings." She dropped a handful of dried nettle and lichen into the pot, and the liquid turned the colour of a pond in June. "Watch the edges. Green bleeds where you don't want it."

They worked through the winter. The mill's orders were for silk scarves that would be sold in London and Paris, and the designs came down from a draughtsman upstairs who drew with a black pen so fine that the lines seemed to hum. Tom wanted to know why the swirls had to be so bold and so black when the butterflies were so soft. Ada took a scarf from the rack and held it to the window. The black lines swept across the silk, lifting the wings off the cloth as if a wind had caught them.

"Ink holds the picture up," she said. "Without it the colour just lies there."

In March the draughtsman was let go and the last scarf was left unfinished on the table. Tom finished it himself, the purple first, then the green, and he drew the black curls last, as steadily as he could manage. When Ada came in on Monday she ran her thumb along one edge and found nothing out of place. She folded it, slipped it into a brown paper bag and handed it to him. "Yours now," she said. "Don't stain the good coat."