Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple butterfly with black swirls

Mixed · Flash

A stylised purple butterfly with patterned wings sits at the centre of the drawing, outlined in black with black swirling linework curling around it. Grey stippled dots and a faint grey sunburst fill the background, with a few purple swirls at the top and bottom. The image is a flat digital illustration in purple, black and grey on a white ground.

Butterfly Swirl Sunburst Dot Wing

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Come closer, the lot of you, the lamp only has oil for one more story. You want the Purple Moth? Nobody calls it that now. The bills said Madame Ysolde's Painted Flight, and that was the last poster she ever had printed, the spring the big top went grey at the seams.

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Her finale was worth the walk to the field. A single lamp swung over the ring, the sunburst painted on the sawdust turned slowly beneath it, and the dust rose off the floor like a scatter of dots. Then out of the dark came the moth, sewn from silk Ysolde dyed herself in a copper pan behind the horsebox, its wings edged with black swirls so it looked drawn rather than made.

Business fell away the way it does, one town at a time. The lions went to a sanctuary in Wales. The strongman took work unloading lorries at Doncaster. By autumn there was only Ysolde, a girl called Pippa who could not stop giggling on the rigging, and a moth that would not fold small enough to pack.

On the last night nobody came. Pippa climbed up anyway and hung from the bar above an empty bench. Ysolde sat with the lamp and watched the silk catch the light, purple and wet as a bruise. 'Shall I drop?' the girl called. 'Fly instead,' said Ysolde, and Pippa let go, and the sunburst turned beneath her, and for one long breath it looked as if the whole tent had decided to stay.