Close view of a blue butterfly tattoo with light outlines on the inner forearm of a person wearing stacked bangles.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue butterfly on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A blue butterfly with pale outlined wings sits on the inner forearm, shown with its wings open and a slim body. The linework is clean and the wings use flat blue fills with lighter detailing. The forearm is shown from a slightly low angle, with bangles and a black bracelet on the wrist and a grey cardigan and white top in the background.

Forearm Butterfly Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pass the salt over, and mind the lamp, because this is the part where the old fools on the Cape run start arguing about the blue one. Listen. The Marisa was nine days out of Lisbon with a hold full of cork and no wind worth the name when it came aboard.

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It came in through the galley porthole, bold as a bailiff, and settled on the rail beside Tomás, the cook's boy, who was peeling potatoes with his thumbs. Wings open flat as a sail, blue as the sea on a clear morning, with a pale edge round them like lace on a christening shawl. Tomás said it was a sign. The mate said it was a moth with ambitions. Nobody could agree on a name, so we called it Dona, after nobody in particular.

Dona rode the rigging for eleven days. She ate nothing we could see and never once went near the bread, which the men took as proof of good breeding. When the calm broke off Finisterre she went up the mainmast like a lantern lit from inside, and we stood at the rail until she was a speck over the swell.

That's the story. Now the bit nobody believes. The next voyage, the mate wrote a line in the log that I have read with my own eyes: blue butterfly seen off the Azores, wind fair, boy happy. A log doesn't lie, not on my ship. Pass the salt, then.