Black and grey photo of a small fine line butterfly tattoo with swirled wings on the back of a person's neck, hair tied up.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small swirled butterfly on the back of the neck

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of a butterfly with heart-shaped, scrolled wings sits on the back of the neck, with a thin body and antennae at its centre. The linework is delicate and mostly solid black, with some fine shading inside the wing curls. The photo is black and white and shows the back of the head and shoulders, with a tank top strap visible and the face out of frame.

Fine line Neck Butterfly Heart Swirl Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gate was nearly finished when Ada Pryce noticed the butterfly had two left wings. She held the bar up to the grey light off the canal and turned it over, the scroll curling back on itself like a fern unrolling in reverse. Her father would have caught it before the first heat. He had caught everything, including the slow way she bent the iron when she thought nobody was watching.

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Nobody had ordered a butterfly. The commission had come from Mrs Harrow at the top of Mill Lane, who wanted a plain gate for her late husband's allotment, and who had paid in advance with a note that said only: make it look like it could fly away. Ada had nodded and said she would.

So she took the bar back to the forge and warmed it again. The coals hissed. She drew the curl tight, then looser, then tight, until the heart shape at the top of each wing sat level with the other. The antennae were the hardest. Two strands of wire, no thicker than a hair, had to keep their spring without snapping in the quench.

When the gate went up the next Saturday, Mrs Harrow stood a long while in front of it without speaking. Then she laughed, a short surprised sound, and pressed her gloved palm flat against the iron wing. "He always said I should have married a man who could draw," she said. "Turns out he was right about the wrong thing." Ada didn't ask what she meant. The butterfly stayed where it was, fixed to the hinge, pointed at the canal.