Silver-white metallic temporary tattoo of a lace-patterned butterfly on a person's upper back, with the head and shoulder partly visible.

Lace butterfly on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of a person's upper back, cropped at the head, with a large butterfly design in silver-white metallic ink near the left shoulder blade. The wings are filled with lace-like cut-out patterns, scrolling curls, dots and scalloped edges, and the antennae curl at the top. The skin is warm-toned and sunlit against a blue sky, with the butterfly centred in the frame.

Back Butterfly Lace pattern Antennae Temporary tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lace moths came down off the dome every summer, and nobody in Carrow Basin had ever caught one that wasn't already dying. My grandmother said they were printed, not grown, that some engineer in the old cities had sent them out to pattern the sky, and that the scallops on their wings were really a map of rivers that no longer ran. I believed her until I was nine and found one folded in the drainage grate by the salt pumps, its silver still bright enough to read my own face in.

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I took it home in a jar and tried to make it fly again. Wrong sort of light, wrong sort of air. Mostly I just kept looking at the curls at the top of its head, the way they unspooled into tight little coils like someone had tried to write a word and given up halfway. I drew them on the back of a ration card to see if I could get them right. I could not. My hand kept wanting to make them tidier.

In the autumn the pumps failed and the whole district went quiet for three days. On the third morning I opened the jar and the moth was gone, and in its place on the glass was a dusting of silver, exactly the shape of its wings, pressed flat as a stamp. I pressed my palm to it and the metal came away warm. Across the road the old canal had started, very faintly, to run again, and the water was catching the light in the same bright lace.