Drawing of a purple awareness ribbon with a butterfly on top and the script Strength through Weakness on a peach background.

Purple ribbon and butterfly design

Colour · Flash

A shaded drawing of a purple ribbon looping across the frame, with a purple butterfly with white-spotted wings resting on its upper loop. The script reads Strength through Weakness in black handwritten lettering over the ribbon, and the ribbon's lower end breaks into dissolving, fragmented edges. The ribbon and butterfly use soft purple shading and highlights against a plain peach background.

Ribbon Butterfly Script Awareness ribbon Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the third step, it gives under a heavy foot. There, that's it. Sit by the stove and I'll tell you about Ada Pennock and the violet silk that would not stay whole.

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Her shop was on a steep lane in Sheffield, a single room with spools stacked to the ceiling and a window that rattled whenever the trams went by below. The city hummed all night in those days, and Ada worked through it with the lamp turned low. A woman came in one wet October evening, coat buttoned wrong, holding a length of purple ribbon the way you'd hold a bird that had flown into a window. It had been through the wash too many times. Its lower end had gone to threads, brittle and pale at the tips.

Ada could have sold her new ribbon, and the woman would have paid and gone. Instead she took out her dyes, the logwood and the alum, and worked the colour back into the silk drop by drop until the ribbon looked like a bruise healing at the edges. She didn't try to mend the frayed end. Every thread she cut to a point, every tear she left open, and she sewed a painted moth onto the upper loop with three careful stitches, its wings black at the rims and silver where the lamplight caught them.

The woman never came back for it. In the morning Ada found the ribbon folded on the counter beside a coin, and through the glass the first sun was catching the moth so that its wings seemed to lift a little, as though they had only just decided to fly.