Colour tattoo of a butterfly with purple, orange and yellow wings, dotted detailing and hanging dotwork chains, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Jewel-toned butterfly on forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A butterfly sits across the forearm with wings filled in purple and orange, outlined in black with rows of yellow and white dots along the edges. Fine black dotted lines and a filigree pattern extend from the body and drop below the wings. The purple shading is soft and gradated, giving the wings a glassy, jewel-like look against the skin.

Neo-trad Dotwork Forearm Butterfly Wing Dotwork Filigree Chain Jewel

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every night in the wet month, the lamplighter of Cinder Row climbed the iron ladder beside the pawnbroker's door and waited for the butterflies to settle. They came up off the river in a slow, jewel-coloured crowd, purple and copper, their wings beaded with yellow dots like the brass studs on a coachman's coat. Old Mrs Tallow, who kept the pawnshop, said they were the lost things of the city, come back to be counted before they were sold.

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One night a girl came up the lane with a silver chain wound three times round her wrist. She wanted money on it. The lamplighter looked at the chain, which was fine as a spider's line and dropped small black beads at every link, and he saw that it was the same thread that hung beneath the wings of the butterfly sitting on the lamp glass. "Where did you get this?" he asked. "My mother's. She said it would cover the rent." He told her the pawnbroker would give her nothing for it, because the chain belonged to the moth that had lost its way.

She laughed at him, then stopped laughing. The butterfly lifted off the glass, dragging a loose length of chain that trailed below its body, and flew down the lane toward the river. The girl followed it, the lamplighter behind her, past the mill and the locked chapel, until the butterfly settled on the rail of the old bridge and folded its wings like a shutter closing.

Nobody in Cinder Row pawned a chain after that. The lamplighter still climbs his ladder each evening, and if you stand under the lamp long enough you can see the dotted thread hanging from the glass, gleaming, while he counts the lamps one by one to be sure none have gone missing.