Fine line tattoo design of a purple and blue butterfly with sparkle accents and swirling vines on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple fine line butterfly with swirls

Fine line · Colour · Flash

A delicate line drawing of a butterfly with outstretched wings, shown on a plain white background. The thin, sketchy linework is shaded in gradients of violet and blue, with small star-shaped sparkles and curling vine-like strokes framing the figure.

Fine line Butterfly Wing Swirl Vine Star Sparkle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The first blue thing I saw at the colliery that spring was on the lamp-room window, a butterfly no bigger than a thumbnail, its wings gone thin as tissue from the dust. Da said it had come down the shaft on somebody's coat. Mrs Pryce at the top of Gelli Row swore it was a sign, and she was the sort who would know.

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Nobody in our row had seen a butterfly since the hillside was tipped over with slag. My brother Idris worked the face on the early shift and came home grey to the eyes, scrubbing at his neck with carbolic until the skin went red. He laughed when I kept a jam jar on the sill with holes punched in the lid. 'It'll not live on coal dust, Nia,' he said. I put in a sprig of clover from the allotment anyway, and a sugar lump, and a twist of Sunday ribbon.

The night the cage stuck at the four hundred foot level, I sat up by the range with the jar in my lap. Every time the wind moved the back door the little wings lifted and settled, lifted and settled, blue as the gas flame under the kettle. Idris came up at six, alive, with a cut over one brow and a story about a fall of stone that made Da laugh until he coughed.

In the morning the jar was empty with the lid still tight on it. I found the butterfly flat on the windowsill, wings open wide, and a fine dusting of silver where it had been. Idris picked it up with his clean fingers and held it to the light. 'Well,' he said, 'it knew the way out before we did.'