Line drawing of six butterflies in a diagonal row, shaded from red at the top through orange, yellow, green and blue to purple, on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Six rainbow butterflies in a diagonal line

Colour · Flash

Six butterflies are drawn in a diagonal line, growing larger from top left to bottom right and shifting through the rainbow from red to purple. Each wing is built from loose, swirling brush strokes with soft colour fills and thin dark antennae. The plain white background leaves the group isolated and easy to lift for use as a design.

Butterfly Rainbow Swirl Antennae

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The butterflies came off the 7.40 this morning, caught in the gap between the carriage door and the platform edge, and I nearly swept them into the drain before I saw the colours. Six of them, stuck to a single sheet of wet card, red at the top and purple at the bottom, each one a little bigger than the last. Mrs Okafor from the tea kiosk says a child must have dropped them from a window, though nobody on the platform admitted to being a child.

I pinned them to the notice board by the clock, where the timetables curl in the damp. People stopped to look. A man in a grey coat asked whether they were real, and I said that depended on who you asked. Nobody has claimed them, so I'm keeping them until the lost property office opens on Monday.

You'll think I've gone soft. Perhaps I have. But when I held the purple one in my palm, its wings wet and swirling as if someone had stirred the ink with a finger, I thought of the summer you wouldn't stop chasing things along this line, always the next train ahead, always bigger in your head than anything you could reach.

The 4.15 is due in ten minutes. I've put the smallest, the red one, in my breast pocket. If you ever come back through Hollins Cross, the rest will still be on the board. Come and collect them yourself.

Yours, Dad