Black ornamental butterfly tattoo with small gem-like dots and a curling antenna on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Ornate butterfly with gems on upper back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's bare upper back shows a black ornamental butterfly with a patterned, scroll-like wing design and small round gem-like dots along the wing edges. A thin curling line forms the antenna on the right, and the tattoo sits beside the shoulder blade against a plain warm skin tone. The background is a dark brown wall, with a black ruffled satin dress in the foreground.

Blackwork Back Butterfly Gem Crystal Swirl Ornament Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cage was still ringing its chain when I saw the butterfly. Nobody else on the night shift looked up. They were shouting for the pump man, and the water was coming through the north drift the colour of stewed tea. But my lamp had caught the seam wall, and there, pressed into the grey like a flower in a family Bible, was a thing with wings.

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I dug it out with my pocket knife, the blade bent before the last stone came free. Twelve clear crystals sat in a fan across the upper wing, each no bigger than a lentil, and a thin curling line of quartz ran off to one side like a feeler. Mr Haddow, the overman, took it from me at the lamp room and turned it over under the bulb. 'Glass,' he said. 'Worth nothing to the company.'

I kept it anyway, wrapped in the handkerchief my mother had embroidered with the village name. Through the winter the water crept higher in the workings, and two more men went down the shaft and came up with different faces. In March the pump failed for a week, and the stones stayed in my waistcoat pocket, warm against my ribs, while the women stood at the pithead with their shawls pulled tight.

When the seam finally opened to the east, I went in first, because I had the eyes for it. There was a whole wall of them, glittering like frost on a window, and I laughed out loud in the dark. Mr Haddow did not write that down. He did sign the paper that gave me a stall in the Market Hall, though, and the first thing I sold there was a brooch shaped like a wing, which I told the buyer had come up from the deep.