Black and grey tattoo of a large white butterfly silhouette set within ornate scrollwork and filigree panels on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

White butterfly in ornamental panel on an arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large butterfly is left as unshaded negative space at the centre of the design, outlined against dark shaded ornament. Surrounding it are filigree motifs, scrolls and a circular panel with fine linework and grey shading. The image is a close, side-on photograph of the arm in black and grey with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Upper arm Butterfly Ornament Filigree Scrollwork Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The screen had to be finished before the pass closed, and Marta had cut eleven panels of brass filigree since the first frost. Each one went onto the chapel wall at Col de Ruffe, where the wind came through the gap hard enough to rattle the lamps. The priest wanted scrolls and vines and nothing that might pass for a living thing, so she worked the metal with a fine saw and a hand lens, her knuckles split from the cold.

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On the last panel she left a hole at the centre, a single clean shape she had drawn on no sheet. Tomas, her apprentice, nine years old and sharp-eyed, asked what it was meant to be. She told him it was a gap for the light. He held the panel up to the nave window, and the thin sun came through pale and trembling in the exact shape of a moth's wings. He laughed and said the priest would be cross.

The priest was not cross. He stood in the cold nave for a long time, then asked her to leave the panel as it was. When the snow shut the pass in November, shepherds came down the mountain and warmed their hands at the iron stove, and some of them looked up at the wall and saw a white butterfly sitting in the ornament, though there was nothing there but brass and the dark behind it.

Marta never told them the shape only showed when the sun sat low over the ridge. In spring Tomas carried the panel down to the village in a sack of straw, and the first thing he did was prop it against the bakery window, where the morning came through and laid the butterfly across the flour sacks, its wings open as if it had only just landed.