Colour tattoo of a pink and green butterfly and a teal butterfly, linked by swirling vines and pink stars, on the side of a person's ribs.

Two butterflies and stars on the ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

Two butterflies sit on the side of the torso, one in pink, purple and green and the other in teal and blue with orange spots. Thin swirling vines with small pink star outlines trail between and around them. The black outlines and bright fills are clean and the colour is saturated, with the design arranged in a diagonal flow across the body.

Ribs Butterfly Swirl Vine Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp needs winding at dusk, and my father never lets me touch the weights, so I sit on the top step of the stair and count the rungs instead. Tonight the gulls have gone quiet and the sea has turned the colour of pewter. Something flickers past the glass of the lantern room, then another, pink as a fingernail in the last of the light.

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Father says butterflies don't cross open water. He says it the way he says the tide tables are right and the Board men in their offices are wrong. But these are coming in from the south-west in a loose string, dipping over the rail and sheltering from the wind behind the brass housing, where the little stars Mam painted on the glass have flaked to specks. I climb up with my cocoa going cold in the tin cup and ease open the hatch.

One is pink and green with a black edge scalloped like lace. The other is teal with gold spots like coins left out in the rain. Between them a thread of tiny red stars drifts across the gallery boards as if someone had dropped a necklace. They settle on the rail beside my hand, light as a thought. Mam left on the mail boat in March with one suitcase and a tin of paints. She said the sea was only a road if you were brave enough to walk it.

At dawn I go down and tell Father. He looks at the wings for a long time, then at the empty paint tin on the dresser, and says nothing, which is how I know he has been waiting too.