Two geometric butterflies and a quote on the chest
Geometric · Chest · Colour · Photo
Two blue butterflies with faceted, origami-like wings sit on the upper chest, one above and one below a diagonal black line of text. The wings use solid blue fills with lighter highlights and darker outlines, giving a crisp, angular look. The photo is taken close up and straight on, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The sign went up on Hollin Lock the week Len started folding butterflies out of the council's mooring demands. I'd painted it myself on a scrap of ply, black capitals on white, as a joke for boaters who leave their windlasses lying about. Len decided it was meant for him. He pinned his first blue butterfly to the tiller, and by Friday there were a dozen clipped along the gunwale, each one cut from a letter with the amount owed still printed across the wings.
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They never stayed put. The wind off the lock pound lifted them into the reeds, and Len would wade in after them in his wellies, swearing softly at the water. I told him a paper butterfly with a debt on it was always going to end up in the cut. He said that was rather the point. Things we folded ourselves ought to be allowed to go where they liked.
The sign got noticed in the end. A lock keeper stopped to read it, tapped the ply with one finger and asked who had painted it. I said I had. He said the consequences were a matter for the office in Watford, then wrote something on his clipboard that I didn't like the look of. Len took it better than I did. That evening he unfolded the last butterfly, smoothed the letter flat on the roof and started another from the back of it, the blank side facing up.
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