Three black tribal-style butterfly designs with swirling wing patterns, shown separately on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three tribal butterfly designs

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows three butterfly designs arranged on a plain white background, one at the top left, one at the top right and one centred below. Each design uses bold solid black linework with swirling, scroll-like inner wing patterns and curled antennae. The designs are entirely black with no greys or colour, and the composition is open and evenly spaced.

Butterfly Swirl Wing Antennae Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Okafor's stall was the last one under the iron canopy at Chapel Market, and the rain had found a way through the tarpaulin so that every ten minutes a fat drop landed on the same square of cardboard. I was nineteen and paid four pounds an hour to hold the umbrella over her scales while she sold cheap umbrellas to people who were already soaked. Nobody bought them. They bought the sugared peanuts and ran for the bus.

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On the Thursday before the flood, a man in a grey mac left three sheets of black card on the counter. His sister had cut them, he said, with a craft knife and a steady hand, and could I keep them dry until he came back for them. I held them flat under my palm. Each one was a butterfly, bold as a shout, its wings packed with scrolls that curled inward like a thought you cannot quite finish. The antennae ended in little hooks, as if they were still listening for something. Mrs Okafor did not look at them. She said the only things worth keeping dry were the things you could not afford to replace, and went back to counting coins.

He never came back. The river rose over the kerb on Saturday and the market shut for a week, and when the stalls reopened the cardboard had gone soft and grey at the edges. I took the middle one home in a biscuit tin and pressed it under a dictionary until it dried flat again.

Some wet afternoons I still take it out and trace a scroll with one finger, following it round and round until it lands back where it started. The rain ticks on my window the way it ticked on that tarpaulin, and for a minute the wing seems to lift off the page and go looking for the man who never returned.