Close-up of a small black fine line butterfly tattoo on the upper chest near the collarbone, with a thin silver chain at the neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small butterfly tattoo near the collarbone

Fine line · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A small butterfly with outlined wings sits on the upper chest, close to the collarbone. The linework is thin and uniform, with the wing veins drawn in simple dark lines and no shading. The image is a soft close-up in warm, neutral skin tones, with a silver ball chain running diagonally across the top left.

Fine line Chest Butterfly Necklace

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad never kept a butterfly alive for longer than an afternoon. He said they were made of too little to trust to a jam jar. Instead he walked the edge of Hollin Wood every Sunday with a pencil behind his ear, and when he got home he drew whatever had landed on him before it could fade from memory. His sketchbooks were full of outlines. Colour, he said, was the part that lied.

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The summer I was nine, the lane flooded after three days of rain and we were cut off from the shop. We sat at the kitchen table with the back door open while a brown moth knocked against the glass. Dad unclipped the silver chain Mum had given him and let its little ball swing over my paper. 'Look how the veins run,' he said, tracing the air above the sheet. 'Out from the middle like the spokes of a bicycle wheel. Draw only those. The colour comes later, if it comes.'

I drew the wings the way he showed me, thin and even, and I left them empty. When the water went down he took the sketchbook to the post office to show Mrs Hale, and she laughed and said I'd drawn a butterfly that had been through the wash. Dad didn't laugh. He pinned that page above the sink and said a thing drawn without colour was the thing you had actually seen.

When he was too ill to walk the wood, I took his last notebook down from the shelf. On the final page was a single pair of wings, outlined, with one line underneath in his small hand: colour to be decided by whoever is still looking.