Black and grey tattoo of two butterflies on the side of a torso, one solid black with pale markings and one detailed with hatched wing linework.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two butterflies on the side of the torso

Blackwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Two butterflies are tattooed on the side of a torso, with a solid black butterfly above and a larger butterfly below. The upper butterfly is filled with solid black ink and pale spots along its wings, while the lower one uses fine hatched linework and shading to show its wing veins and texture. The image is in black and grey with a plain, close crop on the skin.

Blackwork Ribs Butterfly Wing Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The moths came up the estuary every October, and Margaret Ayde had stopped pretending she wasn't waiting for them. She kept the ledger in the back room of the chandlery, between tide tables and a broken barometer, and each year she wrote the same thing in the margin: first light, wind southerly, two swallowtails over the slipway, one of them torn at the hindwing. The torn one had come back three years running. She had decided it was her brother's, though Edwin had been dead since spring of the year before the war and had never once in his life been interested in insects.

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On the morning of the twelfth the black one came down onto the mooring rope and stayed there while the fishermen argued about diesel. It was the solid kind, velvet-dark with a row of pale flecks along the edge like someone had flicked salt at it. Behind it, lower and slower, the big hatched one worked its way along the harbour wall, its veins drawn so finely that the morning light went through them in threads. Margaret wrote it down. Wind southerly, she wrote, and then, after a while, both of them staying.

She went to find the torn one at dusk, out past the lifeboat shed where the grass grew tall and nobody cut it. It was not there. Instead a boy from the net loft was sitting on an upturned crate, whittling a stick to nothing, and he looked up and said the lady at the chandlery had left the back door open, and the moths had gone in after the lamp. She went back along the quay without hurrying. The lamp was lit. Two wings were pressed flat against the glass, one dark, one fine as lace, and neither of them moved while she watched them.