Close-up of a colour butterfly tattoo with a black scrolled outline, shaded in purple, pink and red, on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple butterfly tattoo with scrolled wings

Other · Colour · Photo

A butterfly with stylised, curling wings and a slim body sits centrally in the frame against bare skin. The bold black outline is filled with soft purple, pink and red shading, with a pale blue highlight on the lower left wing. The image is a close, slightly soft phone photograph with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Other Butterfly Wing Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ironwork gates of the Ashgrove conservatory had been bolted since the spring, and Mara still walked past them every night on her way back from the dye works, counting the scrolls. There were eleven on the left gate and nine on the right. The gardener's boy had once told her the smith made them to look like wings if you stood at the right angle, and she had never managed it.

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On the night the rain stopped, she found the gate unlocked and the glasshouse door hanging open on one hinge. Inside, the air smelled of wet soil and something sweeter, like crushed plums. A single butterfly hung from a fern, its wings dark purple at the edges and rose-pink toward the body, the exact colour of the vats she had been stirring all week. It did not stir when she stepped closer. It was tin, painted by someone patient, and a pale blue bead of glass sat in the lower wing where her lamp caught it.

She lifted it down and the stem came away cold and light in her fingers. Behind the potting bench a ledger lay open, its columns of names beside numbers, and her father's name near the bottom had been ruled through with a single neat line. She shut the book, slipped the butterfly into her coat pocket, and felt it knock against her ribs the whole way to the bridge.

At the river she held it out over the black water and let the wind off the estuary work the wings. For a moment the scrolls seemed to turn, as if they meant to carry her back up the hill to the gates. She kept it. By morning the dye had faded from her hands to the same mauve as the tin, and she left the ledger open on the bridge rail for the gulls to read.