Black fine line tattoo of three outlined butterflies with curling swirls on bare skin, placed along the side of the torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three butterflies with swirling linework

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Three butterflies are drawn in black outline with unfilled wings, descending diagonally down the skin. Fine, thin lines trace curling swirls and antennae around them, with small areas of open skin showing through the wings. The image is in black ink only, with the tattoo centred on a close crop of the torso.

Fine line Ribs Butterfly Swirl Scroll Antennae

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth found the exercise book at the bottom of a box marked Christmas, forty minutes before the reunion. The function room at the Crown smelled of carpet shampoo and lukewarm gravy. Someone had propped a photo of the 1995 netball team on an easel by the bar, and Ruth stood beside it with the book held against her coat like a hymnal.

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Jo spotted her first, of course. Jo had always spotted things first: the deputy head's wig, the boy who kept a conker in his blazer. "You brought it," she said, and took the book without asking, turning past the French verbs and a page of bus timetables until she reached the back cover. Three butterflies in biro, their wings drawn as outlines and left empty, because the three of them had argued all through Year Ten about what colour a butterfly should be and never agreed. Shona had wanted gold. Ruth had wanted green. Jo had said nothing, and had been the one to draw the curling antennae that went on forever.

Shona arrived late, in a coat the colour of wet slate, and read the cover over Jo's shoulder without a word. Then she laughed, a proper laugh, the one she used to save for assemblies. "We were going to fill them in," she said. "Every summer. Before the exams. Before Leeds."

Ruth took the biro from Jo's pocket and held it over the nearest wing. The ink had dried to nothing, so she pressed harder until a thin blue line appeared, then stopped. Jo added a small swirl beside it. For a while the three of them stood by the netball photo with the book open between them, and nobody reached for the pens on the bar.