Close crop of a woman in a bikini showing a small black silhouette tattoo of three butterflies on her lower abdomen, near the waistband.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small black butterflies on the lower abdomen

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A cropped photograph of a torso in a light blue bandeau bikini and pink ruffled bottoms, with a beach setting behind. A small black tattoo of three butterflies, one larger and two smaller and drifting upward, sits on the lower abdomen near the waistband. The butterflies are solid black silhouettes with no visible shading, and the photo has saturated, warm colours.

Other Butterfly Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Your master tells you the black must be ground from burnt vine stalks and left to settle for a month, and you think he is teasing the new boy. He is not. By your third spring you have learned to hold the brush so the wings come out in a single stroke, two small and one large, and to leave the body bare like a seed. Nobody buys plain jars anymore. They want something that seems about to move.

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The jar you paint for the harbour magistrate's wife takes eleven days. Three figures climb its shoulder, the largest nearest the lip, the others trailing below as if they have only just decided to leave the clay. Your master studies it for a long while and says nothing, then asks why you have made them look hungry for the air.

You do not answer him. You are thinking of your sister, who walked out to the salt pans and did not come back for the festival, and of the cloud of white moths over the marsh that evening, rising as if it refused to land. The magistrate's wife keeps the jar on her sill above the harbour. Each morning the light through the open shutter throws the three shapes across the far wall, and the boats below slip out past them one by one.

Years later a fisherman tells you the jar went aboard a grain ship bound for Alexandria, and that past the headland a gust tore the lid away and the three black shapes lifted off the wall of the hold and went over the rail. He swears he saw them climb. You tell him that is how it should be, then go back to grinding the vine black, because there is one more jar to finish before the spring.