Colour tattoo of two butterflies on a person's upper back near the shoulder, one shaded red and one shaded blue, with dark outlines.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two butterflies on the upper back

Back · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows two butterflies with outlined wings, one in red and pink tones and one in blue and purple tones, angled towards each other. The wings use smooth gradient shading and lighter highlights, with dark black linework on the edges and bodies. The butterflies sit on the upper back near the shoulder blade, and the photograph is cropped to show the skin and the top edge of a tan top.

Back Butterfly Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every morning in the last month of the season, Ansel Pike walked the big top with a knotted stick and counted the holes in the canvas. Eleven by the second week of September, nineteen by the first frost. Pike's Travelling Wonders had been on the road for forty years and had never once run short of rope, but the cloth was going the way everything goes when nobody has the money to mend it.

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His daughter Nell had two silks sewn by a seamstress from Ledbury who was never paid in full. One was red as a fox's coat, the other blue as a kingfisher's back, each cut into the shape of a butterfly so the flyers would catch the lamplight as they turned. The seamstress said they had to fly as a pair or not at all. Ansel said that was nonsense, and then he sold the blue one to a pawnbroker in Hereford for four pounds to pay for a new axle.

Nell did not speak to him for a fortnight. She flew the red silk alone, from the top bar to the net, and the crowds thinned to a handful of farm boys and one old man who brought his own cushion. On the last Saturday she climbed the rigging after the lamps were out and tied the red wing to her wrist with a length of cord.

The next morning the pawnbroker's boy came up the lane with a parcel in brown paper. Inside was the blue silk, folded small, with a note in a careful hand: the buyer had died in the spring and his widow had sent it back, saying the butterflies should not be kept apart. Nell stitched it to the red one that same afternoon, and when the tent filled that evening she let go of the bar with both wings open, and the sawdust below turned blue and red in the lamplight.