Black tribal-style butterfly tattoo with a blue outline and swirling antennae, placed on the ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal butterfly with blue outline on an ankle

Blackwork · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A tribal-style butterfly with bold black swirls forming its wings and body, with two curling antennae above. The solid black linework is edged in bright blue on the body and parts of the wings, and the design is centred on the skin with plain background around it.

Blackwork Ankle Butterfly Tribal Swirl Antennae

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp at Scarrow Point went electric the winter my father stopped climbing the stairs, but the moths came anyway. They came every August, pale ones and dark ones, batting at the glass as if the lens were a window onto somewhere warmer. Dad called them the Wrecking Crew. I was nine and called them nothing, because I thought naming a thing made it less frightening.

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The one I remember had wings like the iron scrollwork on the gate at Harrow Lane, black curls that pinched in at the edges, and a rim of blue that caught the beam each time it swept past. It came down onto the brass rail beside my hand and stayed there. I didn't breathe. Dad had told me that if you held still long enough, the dust from a moth's wings would settle on your palm and tell you the weather. I held still until my arm shook.

That night a fog came in off the shoals, thick as wet wool. Dad sat in his chair by the stove and counted the foghorn in his head, and I stood at the gallery door with the big torch while the beam went round and round above us. Out in the murk a single engine coughed and went quiet. I waved the torch, uselessly, until a second light answered from the water, then a third.

Forty years on I still check that rail before I lock up. Nothing has landed there since. But on clear nights the beam still swings across the water, and somewhere past the shoals a boat I never saw finds its way home by it.