Traditional style butterfly design in red, yellow, teal and green with black outlines, shown as a drawing with three red drops beneath it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional butterfly flash with red flowers

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A drawing of a stylised butterfly with a green body and yellow and black detailing on its head. Its wings are filled with red, pink and teal flower motifs, green leaves and bold black outlines, with teal edging along the wing tips. Three red drops hang below the body against a plain pale background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tom,

Keep reading

The paint man came over on the Thursday ferry with a tin of red that wouldn't dry, so the Harbour Hall has been the colour of a boiled sweet all week. Mrs Ridley says it will settle. I said nothing, because I have been painting your mother's shutters with the same red, and it keeps running down the sill in three neat drops, as if the wood is weeping over the old names.

Those butterflies you drew on the back of the tide tables are still on the mantel, sixteen of them now, pinned under the clock. The one with the dagger for a body I keep turning to the wall, because it looks too much like the knife you lost in the Sound, and I cannot bear to think of you without it.

The lighthouse keeper's boy found a real one on Sunday, sheltering on the wet rope of the mooring line, its wings the colour of the poppies by the chapel wall. He held it out to me in his palm like a coin. It was not afraid. It sat there until the wind turned, then it went off over the water towards the mainland, and I thought, well, that one knows the way.

Come home on the spring tide. I have kept the ferry bench dry and the kettle full, and when you step off I will not ask you about the sea.

Nell

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