Mixed-colour skull and butterfly tattoo with red eye sockets on the top of a foot, in a traditional style.

Skull and butterfly hybrid on the top of a foot

Traditional · Other · Mixed · Photo

A butterfly whose wings are formed from a skull, with antennae and a segmented body running down the centre. The skull's eye sockets are filled with red ink, and the rest is shaded in grey with dark outlines. The design fills the centre of the frame on the top of a foot, set against a light textured towel.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the lamp, it's the last of the paraffin. Forty years this show went up and down the coast, and the rule was always the same: the big top goes up before the rain and comes down after the money. Then the money stopped, didn't it, and Dolores Ashby was left holding a banner nobody would pay to see.

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Her banner was a butterfly. Not a pretty one. A lad called Tobias Reeve painted it, came to us from a bone-yard in Margate with ink under his nails and no coat. He'd worked out that a wing is only a window, and if you looked through it long enough you'd see what sat behind. So he painted a skull for each wing, the jaw hanging down like a cape, and in every socket he set a little red lamp of paint. Dolores said it would frighten the children. Tobias said that was the point.

On the last night of the season the sea fog rolled in thick off the shingle, and the tent filled with people who'd come for the warmth and stayed for the banner. Nobody paid. Dolores stood beneath it and counted coins into a biscuit tin, and when she'd finished she said the thing I've never forgotten: the eyes were the only lights left on the front, and a moth goes to the only light it can find.

We packed up before dawn. Tobias walked the banner down to the beach and laid it flat on the sand, and the tide took it out slowly, red eyes last. Sit still now. Listen. That's the sea doing the job the show couldn't.

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