Close-up of a woman's neck showing a small fine line black butterfly tattoo with thin antennae, placed on the side of the neck below the ear.

Small butterfly tattoo on the neck

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small butterfly with outstretched wings and thin antennae is tattooed on the side of a woman's neck. The design is drawn in fine black linework with light shading in the wings, and the tattoo is the sharpest point of the image. The soft-focus background, pale and out of focus, keeps attention on the neck and the tattoo.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The painted lady came in on the south wind the week the ferry stopped running, which Mam said was no coincidence, because nothing on Ardnish arrived without a reason. I found it on the kitchen window, wings folded flat against the salt-streaked glass, its feelers trembling as if they were still reading the sea.

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I had a tin of pins and a box of stiff card from the post office, and I meant to mount it properly for the schoolroom case. Mr Gillies, who taught us nature on Tuesdays when the teacher was across on the mainland, once told us that a butterfly which has crossed water carries a little of the other shore in the dust on its wings. I didn't believe him. I did believe the pale powder on my thumb after I touched it, and I didn't wash it off.

By evening the wind had swung round and the sky over Eilean Mòr was the colour of pewter. I carried the insect out to the wall by the peat shed, meaning to let it go where the air was warmer, and it didn't fly. It opened its wings once, slowly, like a letter being unfolded to be read aloud, then lifted off towards the north-west, towards nothing I could see but grey water and the faint line of the next island.

Mam watched me from the doorway with her arms folded. "They always go back," she said, "the ones that come in. It's only the going that needs a witness." I still have the pin tin. The box of card stayed empty.

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