Colour neo-traditional tattoo on a limb showing an orange butterfly, leaves, a geometric flower and a bird's head, with black outlines and dot shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Neo-traditional butterfly and bird on a limb

Neo-trad · Other · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a butterfly with orange wings, a geometric flower with green and orange accents, leaves, and a bird's head with brown feathers against a red background. Bold black outlines, dot shading and saturated colour define the forms. The design fills the frame vertically, with framed artwork on the wall behind the limb.

Neo-trad Other Butterfly Moth Leaves Flower Bird Geometric Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hawk had been sitting on the winding wheel since before the day shift came up, and Mrs Hollis at the lamp room said it was a bad sign, though she said that about most things. Nell pretended not to hear. She had her grandmother's tin under her arm, the one with the cracked hinge, and inside it the pressed moths lay in their tissue like pages of a book nobody read any more.

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Her father's cap was on the hook by the cage gate where he'd left it that morning, and the red danger flag hung limp beside the lamp room door. Nobody had lowered it in three days. The men said the seam ran hot under Ashdale and that the gas would find a way up before the month was out. Nell had heard them say it in the Miners' Welfare with their pints going flat.

She opened the tin on the step. Her grandmother had once told her that a butterfly carried whatever you gave it, so you had to choose carefully. Nell chose the orange one with the green diamonds on its wings, the one her grandmother had caught the summer before the strike, and she held it up to the morning. The wind took it sideways, past the flag, past the wheel, and the hawk lifted its brown shoulders and watched it go without moving.

When the cage bell rang at noon, the hawk was still on the wheel, and her father came up through the gate with his face black and his hands shaking, laughing at something Tom had said. Nell shut the empty tin. The red flag stayed where it was, and somewhere above the spoil heap a small orange wing kept rising.