Small purple butterfly tattoo on the side of the ribs, with a light blue sports bra sitting just above it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small butterfly on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A small butterfly with shaded purple-blue wings sits on the side of the ribcage, shown in a close crop of the torso. The linework is fine and the wings have soft tonal shading. The tattoo is the clear focal point against plain, pale skin and a light blue sports bra.

Fine line Ribs Butterfly Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the cake. My grandmother always said a butterfly will find its way into any wedding that has too much rain in it, and she was right about the Harrow wedding, the summer the church roof leaked into the font. Nobody remembers the bride's name now. They remember the blue one.

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It came in through the open door of the vicarage hall while Walter Pike was making his speech, and it landed on the rim of the punch bowl. Purple wings, dark at the edges, the colour of a bruise going off. Everyone stopped talking. Walter lost his place in his notes and read the same line about his brother twice, and the butterfly stayed put, opening and closing its wings as if it were counting something.

Now here is the part I had from the bride herself, who was ninety-one when she told it to me and had not lost one ounce of spite. She had been going to call the whole thing off that morning. The groom had forgotten the ring twice, and she had sat in the vestry with her gloves in her lap, deciding whether a man who forgot things was a man worth keeping. The butterfly, she said, sat on that bowl until she came out from the garden and saw it. Then it lifted off, went straight past her shoulder, and out through the window toward the church.

She married him. They were married fifty-six years. The ring stayed in his waistcoat pocket the whole time, and he never once forgot it again.