A butterfly design in purple, blue and teal with black borders and spotted wing edges, shown on a white card beside a ruler.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple and teal butterfly design

Colour · Flash

A single butterfly is drawn with open wings, viewed from above, against a plain white background. The wings are shaded in purple, blue and teal, with black outlines, black veining and rows of white spots along the wing edges. The design sits centred on a white card, with a ruler below it for scale.

Butterfly Wing Antennae Vein Spots

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The village hall smells of urn tea and floor polish, and someone has strung paper bunting across the stage where the nativity used to be. You stand by the raffle table with a name badge that says Nicola Pryce in marker pen, and for a moment you cannot place the woman it belongs to. Across the room, Gail Hartigan is still wearing the grin she wore in Year Nine, the one that meant trouble was already on its way.

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That summer, Mr Denholm kept a mesh cage of painted lady chrysalises on the windowsill of the biology room, each one hung like green jewellery from a twig. Gail was the one who unhooked the lid on the last afternoon, because she said a thing should be allowed to leave before the bell rings. Denholm went red to the collar. You remember the sash window propped open with a wooden ruler, and one butterfly tilting up past the blind, its underwings flashing blue-green like a signal from a boat.

Now Gail crosses the hall with two plastic cups of red wine and asks if you still have the logbook. You say it went in a skip years ago. She laughs, rummages in her handbag, and produces a cracked exercise book with a tally of every hatching, the dates written in your round, careless hand. On the back page is a sketch you do not remember making: a pair of wings, violet at the tips, teal at the base, and beside them the word KEEP, underlined twice.

"You never let me finish it," Gail says, tapping the page with a bitten nail. You turn the book over, and through the open doors a real moth has found the lamp above the car park, batting at the glass as if it has somewhere to be. You close the book on the drawing and tuck it under your arm. The raffle is about to be drawn, and somebody is calling your name.