Black-outlined butterfly tattoo with blue, teal, pink and orange wings on the chest.

Multicoloured butterfly on the chest

Traditional · Chest · Mixed · Photo

A butterfly with a solid black body, antennae and outlined wings, filled with blue, teal, pink, orange and pale peach panels. The bold black outline and flat colour fills suggest a traditional-style design. The butterfly sits centrally on the chest, shown straight on against a plain skin background.

Traditional Chest Butterfly Antennae Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Orla Pennick had stitched the bride's veil three times before the bell at Saint Aldred's rang, and each time the silk went the colour of wet slate at the knot. Her mother said it was nerves. Her grandmother, who had kept bees on the moor above Hebden for fifty years, said it was a butterfly wanting out.

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Nobody took the old woman seriously. The vicar was counting hymn sheets, the groom's brothers were arguing over the car keys, and the cake woman had her back to the nave. So nobody saw the black shape lift from the veil as the bride turned to the door. It was as dark as a pressed letter, its wings banded with the blue of the mill pond, then teal, then the orange of a fox in February, then pink like the inside of a shell. It rose up the aisle and went out through the open door into the sunlight.

The bride laughed, the first real laugh of the morning, and the groom's uncle called it a sign of good luck. Orla's grandmother only took her pipe from her apron pocket, looked at the empty pew where the thing had been, and said that a butterfly does not leave a veil unless it has found a better one to wear.

That night Orla folded the veil into the trunk and found a single black scale stuck to the hem, no bigger than a fingernail. She kept it in an old tin with the bride's ribbon, and when the frost came she took it out and held it to the window, where it caught the lamp and shone like a small wet stone.