Black tree with flowers and butterflies, some in red, across a bare back, with a small silhouette figure on the right side.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree and butterflies across a back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A bare back and side of a torso shows a large black tree with spreading branches and outlined flowers. Butterflies in grey and a few red tones drift across the right side, with a dark silhouette of figures near the lower right. The image is shot against a dark background with bright blue-white light streaks, which contrasts with the pale skin.

Back Tree Flower Butterfly Silhouette Figure

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada had been told the rowan on the far side of the pass would die by midsummer, so she climbed up with a bucket of water and a tin of lamb's wool for the roots. Her brother Tomas walked ahead, complaining about the cold, and the wind kept tugging the hem of her coat as though it wanted her to turn back to the village.

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The tree was not a rowan after all. It was an old ash, bent almost flat by the weather, its branches spread like the fingers of someone reaching for a railing in the dark. Pale flowers grew from the knots in its bark, each one ringed with a darker edge, and when the sun broke through the cloud a scatter of small grey butterflies lifted from the stones beneath it, then turned, and went up the slope in a slow, uneven drift. Tomas said they were just moths. Ada said moths did not have red at the wings, and then she saw that some of them did.

Their mother had gone over the pass in March, the spring the snow came early, with a man from the valley who sold carved spoons. Nobody had seen her since. Ada had come up each Sunday after that, not to find her, but to see whether the tree still had the figures cut near its roots, two shapes, one taller, holding hands, the way her mother used to hold hers at the church gate.

The shapes were there, worn into the lichen and nearly gone. Ada knelt, wet the stone with her thumb, and pressed her palm against the taller one until it fit. Tomas stood a long time behind her, then knelt too, and the butterflies came down around them and settled on the branches like something that had decided, at last, to stay.