Red tribal-style butterfly design with bold wings and the Greek letters delta, sigma and theta set between them, shown as a flash design with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red tribal butterfly design with Greek letters

Colour · Flash

A bold red tribal butterfly with symmetrical, flame-like wing patterns and spiky tips. The Greek letters delta, sigma and theta are stacked vertically in the centre between the wings. The design is a solid single-colour graphic on a plain white background, with no shading.

Butterfly Tribal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wind off the bay has got under the front door again, and the hall runner lifts like something breathing. You sign the ledger in pencil because the pen on its chain has gone dry, and Mrs Okonedo at the desk, who has run Sandrin House for thirty-one summers, watches you write your name without a word. Above her, a red paper butterfly hangs from a drawing pin, its wings cut into flame-shaped points. Someone left it in room nine the spring the lighthouse went dark.

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She tells you about it while she unlocks the door. Three sisters came every August for six years and took the same room, and each night before bed they pressed a seal of three Greek letters, delta, sigma, theta, into the inside of the window glass with a warm wax stick, so the sea would see it at dawn. They said the letters were a promise to look after one another, and the butterfly was the sign that a sister had come back safely. The wax is still there, faint as a bruise, under years of salt.

You open the window. The sea is grey and pitching, and far out a single fishing boat is turning for the harbour, its wake a white V pointing back at the land. Mrs Okonedo says the girls stopped coming the year the eldest moved north, and nobody has slept in nine since without leaving the sash open a crack.

That night you lie awake listening to the shutters knock. Before dawn you find the paper butterfly on your pillow, though you are certain she left it pinned to the desk. Rain has started on the glass. You press your palm flat against the cold pane, and through the salt you can feel the old wax lines, three of them, pointing out towards the water.