A small tattoo of a pink awareness ribbon forming butterfly wings with black swirled outlines, placed on the outer ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink ribbon butterfly on an ankle

Ankle · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a pink awareness ribbon shaped into the body of a butterfly, with black linework forming the outline and curling swirls for the wings and antennae. The pink ribbon is filled with solid colour, while the swirls are drawn in thin black lines. It is a small, centred design photographed against a pale leg and a wooden floor.

Ankle Butterfly Ribbon Awareness ribbon Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

On the island of Lessay the women said the butterflies that came in late summer were the souls of fishermen's wives, who had waited on the harbour wall until the wind took them out over the water. Morag Tulloch had a pink ribbon she wore in her hair on market days, and when the gale came in October with the boats still out, she tied it to the gate of the net loft so the men would see it from the sea. The gale tore the gate off its hinges and the ribbon went with it.

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Her daughter Ysbel walked the shore for nine days looking for it. The men had come home by then, all but Eachann Breck, whose boat was never found. On the tenth morning she climbed the Scarrow cliffs and found the ribbon caught on a gorse bush at the edge, stretched and knotted by the wind until its two ends stood up like wings. The black threads of the gorse had drawn a fine outline around it, and a few curling stems had caught the spray and twisted into spirals.

She did not take it down. She went back each evening that winter and stood where the cliff path turned, and the ribbon lifted and dropped in the wind like something breathing. The boats came in that spring by its light, the old women said, though nobody on Lessay could see a light there at all.

The gorse is still standing on the Scarrow cliffs. Nobody on the island cuts it, and nobody walks past without looking to see whether the ribbon is still there.