Shaded grey basketball and sneaker tattoo with a green butterfly and script reading Rookie #45, placed on the upper back.

Basketball, sneaker and butterfly on the back

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A grey-shaded basketball sits beside a sneaker with loose laces, with a small green and blue butterfly above and cursive script reading Rookie #45 at the top left. The ball and shoe are rendered with soft shading and highlights in black and grey. The butterfly is the only area of colour, giving a clear contrast against the monochrome elements.

Realism Back Sneaker Butterfly Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every evening Dessa bounced the old ball against the harbour wall at Saltmarrow, counting aloud because her brother had always counted, and the gulls kept score from the bollards. The ball was split along one seam and smelled of tar. Her brother Piet had left it behind when he went up the coast to play for the Gannet Club, and he had left his trainers too, one lace trailing like a rope nobody had tied off.

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The harbour master, old Joost, said a boy who leaves his shoes behind will come back for them or never. Dessa did not believe in curses, but she believed in laces. She tied the loose one each night with a double knot, and each morning it was undone again. Once there was a green and blue butterfly resting on the toe, as if it had flown in off the sea to keep the shoe company.

On the thirtieth night the ball came off the wall at the wrong angle and rolled under the fish crates. Dessa crawled after it and found a number scratched into the lid of a crate in Piet's careful hand: forty-five, the same number he had worn on the shirt in the photograph over the chandler's counter. Under the crate the butterfly was waiting with its wings folded, and it lifted when she reached for the ball.

The next morning she took the trainers to the post office and sent them north with a note: the laces are tied, come home when you are ready. Then she went back to the wall and bounced the ball once more, counting, and this time she reached forty-five and stopped, because the gulls had already gone quiet to listen.