Black silhouette of a girl blowing a stream of red butterflies across the upper back, placed near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Silhouette girl releasing red butterflies on upper back

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A black silhouette of a girl in profile sits at the lower left of the design, with her head and hair breaking up into a cloud of red butterflies that drift up and to the right. The linework is solid black fill for the figure and flat red for the butterflies, with no visible shading gradients. The design sits on the upper back near the shoulder blade, with the figure and butterflies arranged diagonally across the skin.

Back Girl Silhouette Butterfly Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody believed Ruth Calloway the first time she came up the caravan steps with red dust on her collar. The fair had pitched at Harrowby Green for three days and the ground was still soft from the rain, so when the generator failed and the lads went off to find a spanner, it was Ruth who sat on the step of the hook-a-duck tank eating a toffee apple and laughing at Mr Pell's conjuring. Her plait came undone at the laugh, and out of it came the butterflies, red as the sealing wax on a telegram, lifting off her hair and drifting over the dodgems towards the lights of the big top.

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I was the one who had to fix the generator, so I was the one who saw the crowd gather at the edge of the field with their mouths open. Mrs Odell, who owned the whole show and everyone in it, had me stand between the crowd and the girl and say nothing, and by the next evening she was charging a penny a head to watch Ruth sit on the step and sigh. The trouble was that the butterflies only came when Ruth forgot herself. Every time Mrs Odell pinned her hair up tight and made her smile at the customers, the air over the stalls went still and empty.

On the last night at Harrowby, Ruth told me she was done with it. She packed a carpet bag, tied her hair up in a grey scarf, and walked out past the hawthorn hedge without waiting for the wagons. I drove the lorry slowly along the lane behind her, and I watched the butterflies come loose one at a time, then in fistfuls, rising over the field and settling in the thorns until the whole hedge was lit up red as a pillar box.

Mrs Odell never charged another penny at Harrowby Green. Some nights I still stop the lorry at that bend and look back, and the hedge is always a little redder than the lamp should make it.