Black linework butterfly flash design with purple shaded wings, scrolling tendrils and a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple tribal butterfly design

Mixed · Flash

A symmetrical butterfly drawn with bold black outlines, swirling tendrils and curled wing tips. The wings are filled with purple that fades from deep violet at the edges to white near the centre. The design is shown alone on a plain white background.

Butterfly Wing Swirl Tendril Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lantern is already lit when you reach the stile, and the moths are already arguing with the glass. Mrs Pell has left you a list on the back of a feed bill: paraffin, a new wick, the long ladder, and a warning not to look at the big ones' wings for too long. You climb anyway. From the top rung the wood spreads below you like spilt ink, and past the last cottage the trees go violet at their edges where the dusk settles into them.

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The butterflies come at the turn of the year, when the blackthorn gives up its last petals. They are not moths, whatever Mrs Pell says. They have tails of black wire that curl back on themselves like the scrolls on the churchyard gate, and they land on the glass and fold and unfold until their wings lose colour from the outside in: deep purple at the rim, paling as it goes, until the middle is white as a candle stub. You have seen the dye-woman's cloth fade the same way on the washing line.

Tonight one settles on your sleeve instead of the glass. Its feet are cold and very light. Everyone in Holloway knows that a butterfly which lands on you has come to carry something back into the trees, a name, a debt, a word you meant to say and didn't. You hold very still and do not breathe. Up on the ladder the lamp hisses. Mrs Pell's voice drifts up from the garden, asking whether the wick is trimmed.

You tell her it is. The butterfly lifts, circles the flame twice, and drops into the black trees with its wire tails trailing, and the lamp burns steadier after that though you have not touched it. In the morning there is a single wing on the cottage step, purple at the edge and white at the heart. Nobody in the village will say they dropped it, and nobody picks it up.