Flash design of a butterfly with stained-glass style wings in yellow, green and orange, with a red rose at its centre and black outlines.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stained glass butterfly with rose design

Colour · Flash

A stylised butterfly drawn with bold, speckled black outlines and curling swirl antennae. The wings are filled with soft yellow, green and orange washes that resemble stained glass, and a red rose sits in the centre of the body. The design is shown against a plain white background.

Butterfly Rose Swirl Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Margaret had brought the cardboard tube with her to the reunion, which Alan found faintly ridiculous until she unrolled it on the trestle table between the sausage rolls and the squash. Inside was the cartoon she had made in the fourth year, the one Mr Pryce had pinned above the kiln and then, for reasons nobody ever explained, binned. Pale washes of yellow and green, black lead running round every wing like wire round a fish pie. In the middle sat a rose, red as a postbox.

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"You kept it," Alan said.

"I kept the bit I could remember," she said. "The rest of the window was yours."

He had cut the glass for it. He remembered the cold smell of the workshop, the slide of the cutter, the way the offcuts had gone into a biscuit tin that rattled whenever the caretaker walked past. He had never once thought of the butterfly as hers, although she had drawn every curl of its antennae with a patience he found almost unbearable.

She tapped the rose. "Pryce said the colours were lying. Glass only glows when the light comes through it from behind." Alan looked up at the strip lights humming overhead, then back at the drawing, and understood that she had been waiting thirty years to say it out loud. Outside, the car park lamps came on one by one.