Two coloured butterfly tattoos with pink and green wings, joined by black swirling tendrils across the lower stomach beside a navel piercing.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two butterflies with swirls on the lower stomach

Other · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows two butterflies, one higher on the right side of the abdomen and one lower on the left, linked by long black swirling tendrils that curl across the skin. The wings have pink, purple and green shading with fine dark veining, while the tendrils are solid black with tapered ends. The composition runs diagonally across the stomach, with a navel piercing visible at the top of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The botanists swear the butterflies were a mistake, bred from a batch meant for the pollination decks and never logged properly, but I have stopped arguing with them. Yesterday the pair from Bay Nine slipped out when the scrubber fans were serviced, and by the time I reached the spiral stair they had already taken the long way round the algae tanks, pink wings catching the grow-lamps and going green at the edges where the light came through.

They followed the black ribbon of cable we strung between the hanging gardens last spring. You remember how it looked, a single dark line looping from the north rail down past the water pumps, thinning to a point where it curled back on itself like a fern unrolling. The butterflies seemed to read it as a route. The higher one kept settling on the curl near the ceiling vent, opening and closing its wings as if it wanted to be let in.

I climbed the maintenance ladder with a torch in my teeth and a stupid amount of hope. When I reached the vent, the thing was gone, drawn up into the air shaft where no one has been since the first winter. The lower one, though, had waited on the rail the whole time. It walked onto my glove, cold and deliberate, and let me carry it back down to the light.

I have put it in the nursery bay with the others. The council will want a report, and I will write one, but I doubt it will mention the way it sat on my knuckle as though it had been waiting for me to come back down.

Yours, Ines

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