Close-up of a butterfly tattoo in a tribal-style design, with bold black swirled outlines and purple, pink and blue fill, on skin.

Tribal-style butterfly on skin

Other · Mixed · Photo

A butterfly with outstretched wings, drawn with thick black swirling linework in a tribal-influenced pattern. The wings are filled with purple, pink and blue shading, with the blue and purple sitting within the black scrolls. The image is a close, slightly angled shot of the tattoo on a patch of skin, with a glossy surface sheen.

Other Butterfly Wing Swirl Tribal pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dyers of Kessaly kept their vats behind the east wall, where the river smelt of madder and iron. My mother taught me that a dye that will not hold is only a rumour of colour, and I believed her until the summer the Queen's moth-keeper came asking for blue.

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Blue was the hardest. Kessaly had no blue that stayed in cloth past a single wash, so the court bought its banners from Orrin, across the salt flats, at a price that made the treasurer weep. The moth-keeper, Teodric, had a jar of wings he swore were older than the wall. He wanted them ground into the pigment, and he wanted the swirls of the pattern laid down first in black lacquer, so the colour would sit inside them like water in a carved stone.

I tried for nine nights. On the ninth, the lacquer cracked and the blue bled out into the purple, and I cursed the jar, the moth-keeper and my own clumsy hands. Teodric only laughed and held a wing up to the lamp. 'It was never meant to stay where you put it,' he said. 'Look where it went.' The purple had crept up into the black scrolls, into every gap the lacquer had left open, and the whole wing seemed to lift off the cloth.

We painted the Queen's banner that way, and it hangs in the great hall still, faded but not lost. Each spring, when the swallows come back over the wall, I walk the dye-road to the old vat and find a fleck of blue caught in the stone, where the colour went looking for something to hold it.