Colourful traditional butterfly tattoo on an upper arm, with a lighthouse, sunset, sailing ship and flowers in its wings.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional butterfly with lighthouse and ship

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A bold butterfly fills the arm, with each wing holding a scene: a red and white lighthouse, a sunset over the sea with birds, and a dark-sailed ship among clouds. Solid black outlines define the shapes, and the wings are filled with red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. Flowers sit at the lower wing edges, and the design is shown in a close, straight-on view.

Traditional Upper arm Butterfly Lighthouse Ship Sunset Sea Bird Flower Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The painted lady is still on the wall when you come down the cliff path after the gale, pinned to the lichen beside the gate with its wings flat open as if someone had asked it to hold still. You crouch on the wet flags and look properly. Inside its wings is the whole harbour in miniature: a red and white lighthouse standing on a slope of green, a sun sinking through bands of orange over a sea the colour of ink, and, on the far side, a dark-sailed ship lying low among clouds.

Keep reading

Your grandfather kept the buddleia along this wall for the painted ladies that came up from the coast every August. He logged them in the back of the light book, between the tides and the lamp hours, because he said a keeper ought to know what was passing. Nobody else on the headland bothered. You used to think it was a kind of stubbornness, the way he wrote down wings the same as wrecks.

You carry the butterfly home on a card and copy its wings onto cartridge paper in pencil, then in the tin of paints he left in the shed. The sunset comes out too pink. The ship's sails are harder, because you have never once seen them black. You stare at the bow until you recognise the figurehead, a woman with one arm raised, and then you remember the Marigold, which went onto Scarrow Rock in the winter of 1961 with his younger brother aboard and a light that was, for one whole night, switched off.

You pin the drawing above the bench. At dusk the lamp on the headland begins its slow sweep across the water, and for once you do not count the seconds between flashes. You watch the wings of the picture fill with the same light, and let it be enough to see by.