Small colour tattoo of seven butterflies in pink, purple, teal and orange flying down the skin of the torso, with a partial star tattoo at the top left.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Trail of small coloured butterflies on skin

Other · Colour · Photo

Seven small butterflies follow a diagonal path down the skin, each with dark outlines and soft shading in pink, purple, teal, orange and blue tones. The wings have gradient colour fills, and the butterflies vary in size and angle to suggest movement. A partly visible pink star and dark linework sit in the top left corner of the frame.

Other Butterfly Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swifts had long since given up on Carrick Hall, but the butterflies never did. Every June they came out through the chapel window where the lead had rotted away, seven of them, always seven, and my grandfather said they were the last of the Ashbys trying to get out of the walls.

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I was nine the summer Mr Penhallow from the estate office came with his clipboard and a surveyor's tripod and told us the roof would come down by Michaelmas. He wanted the chapel fenced. My grandfather said nothing. He took me up the spiral stair instead, where the stone was warm, and showed me the carvings on the sill: a line of small winged shapes, each one chipped a little differently, as if someone had counted them into the stone.

We counted them that evening, seven shapes, seven flutters. The orange one was always last, dragging a little, and that night it sank low over the moat, then rose again and hung above the water as if it had changed its mind. Grandfather said the old ones liked to be seen off. So we stood on the bank and waved, and I waved for the last one twice.

The chapel came down in the autumn gales, all but the sill. Penhallow put a plaque on the fence post, and I was allowed to keep one chip of stone shaped like a wing. The next June I stood at the gap in the fence and counted seven butterflies lifting out of the rubble, and the orange one circled back to settle on my knuckle before it went on.