Traditional style colour tattoo of a butterfly with a red crescent moon, green leaves and a red flower on a leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional butterfly with crescent moon

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A butterfly with black wings edged in yellow, red and green fills most of the image, with a red crescent moon, two green leaf sprigs and a red five-petalled flower around it. The bold black outlines are solid and even, and the wings use smooth shading with stripes of colour along their bands. The design sits on a skin surface shown at a close angle against a light blue backdrop, with the tattoo centred in the frame.

Traditional Other Butterfly Crescent moon Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you with the bad knee, because I tell this one low and I won't shout it over the lorries. The crossing at Vell was only a striped pole and a tin hut back then, and the guard inside it, Orsolya Dane, kept a jar of boiled sweets and a ledger in which she wrote down everything that passed the line, except what she had been paid to forget.

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One October a butterfly came down on the pole. Its wings were black as a coal scuttle and edged in yellow, scalloped like the hem of a good Sunday dress, and bands of red and green ran through them the way bunting runs along a fair. It would not fly over. Three mornings it sat there, opening and closing its wings, while drivers leaned out of their cabs and swore at it. Each night a thin red moon hung above the hut, and each night the butterfly turned its face towards the moon as if checking the time.

On the fourth morning Orsolya stepped out with her jar and found a red five-petalled flower lying on the tarmac beneath the pole, fresh as if it had been picked that minute. She opened the ledger, wrote the date, and under passengers she wrote one word: passed. Then the butterfly lifted, cleared the line without a single hesitation, and was gone over the hill. That is the only entry I ever saw her write in pencil, and she never told me why.