Three colourful butterflies tattooed down the side of a person's ribs, shown from behind in a grassy garden setting.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three butterflies on the side of the torso

Ribs · Colour · Photo

The image shows a person seen from behind with their back and side torso bare, their hair falling over one shoulder. Three butterflies in blue, pink and teal tones are arranged in a diagonal line down the side of the torso, each outlined in black with soft shading across the wings. The background is green lawn and foliage, with the patterned skirt of the wearer visible at the bottom of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Starlight Rooms smelled of French chalk and warm lemonade by eight o'clock, and the fanlight over the side door had been propped open since the band started. That was how the butterflies got in. Three of them, blue at the edges, pink and teal in the middle, came drifting over the heads of the dancers as if they had paid for a ticket. Ivy saw them first and grabbed my wrist hard enough to leave marks.

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"They're sailors' ghosts," she said, because Ivy said things like that when she was happy. Mr Dunmore, who ran the cloakroom with me and disliked anything that flew, tried to shoo them with a rolled programme. They ignored him. They went round the mirror ball in a loose line, one after the other, the way the couples did in the last waltz, and every time the saxophone climbed, they climbed with it.

Walter was due on the eleven o'clock boat. Ivy had told me so twice, and then once more in the ladies' with her lipstick going on crooked. When the band played the last number she was out on the floor with him, and the butterflies came down low enough to brush the bunting, and I thought, that's the lot of them, they'll go out with the crowd.

They didn't. They settled on the rail of the bandstand, wings closing and opening slowly as if counting. When I went to lock up at midnight Ivy was sitting on the cloakroom step with her shoes in her hand, saying nothing, and the three of them were still there, pink, blue and teal, catching the streetlamp. I left the fanlight open for them.

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