Colourful neo-traditional tattoo of a hippy camper van with a peace sign and flowers, surrounded by butterflies and smoke, on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hippy camper van with butterflies

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A bold tattoo of a VW-style camper van with a peace sign and red and yellow flowers painted on its side, drawn with thick black outlines. The van has grey wheels and a rounded front, and is wreathed in clouds of smoke, with small red and grey butterflies scattered around its base. Saturated colour dominates the design against the skin, with soft shading on the wheels and body.

Neo-trad Upper arm Peace sign Flower Butterfly Smoke Cloud Wheel

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The van came up the Hollin road at dusk with its exhaust coughing grey into the snow, and Marjorie Teale heard it before she saw it, a wheezing like an old dog climbing stairs. She had the fire banked and the last guests, two lorry drivers and a surveyor, already upstairs with their boots off. She pulled the bar towel from her shoulder and went out to the yard in her slippers.

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The driver was a lad of maybe twenty with frost caught in his beard. Behind him the camper's sides were painted with peace signs and daisies gone pale in the weather, and the orange roof was dented where a branch had come down. "Engine's packed in," he said. "Can I stop till the gritter comes?" Marjorie looked at the back window, where something small and red was fluttering against the glass, and said he could have the room over the stables if he didn't mind the draught.

Inside, he unloaded a shoebox that held no clothes and no tools, only a dozen paper butterflies cut from card and painted red and grey. He pinned them along the beam above the stove one at a time. "My nan drove this van to Cornwall in 1974 with four children and a goat," he said. "She told me butterflies only land where someone's been kind to them. I've never found out if that's true."

Marjorie said nothing for a while. Then she reached up, took the last butterfly from his fingers and pinned it herself, crooked, beside the clock, while the wind pushed at the shutters as if it wanted in. By morning the lane was white to the gateposts and the van sat under its drift like a loaf under a cloth. When the sun came through the window, the butterflies on the beam looked for all the world as though they meant to leave.