Close view of a realistic blue and white butterfly tattoo on the inner forearm, with stacked bangles on the wrist.

Blue butterfly on an inner forearm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A blue and white butterfly with shaded wings sits on the inner forearm of a person wearing a grey cardigan and stacked bracelets. The wings are rendered with soft shading and pale highlights, and the body and antennae are drawn in fine lines. Blue ink dominates the design against the skin, and the subject is framed from the chest down with a dark background.

Realism Forearm Butterfly Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The blue butterfly had been folded inside the ship's logbook for eleven weeks, pressed between the pages where Mrs Adeyemi kept the bread counts, and when the hold flooded off the Azores it was the only thing Tomas thought to save. He carried it up the companionway in his cupped palms like a coal. Captain Orr was shouting for buckets. The sea was the colour of slate and climbing the rails.

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The butterfly had come aboard at Lisbon, in the cabin of a painter named Ruth Ferreira who was travelling to Halifax to sell her last canvases. She had painted it onto a scrap of linen from a dead sailor's shirt, wings washed in a blue she mixed from crushed lapis and linseed. She gave it to Tomas for mending the frame of her easel. Nobody had told him butterflies could cross an ocean, and he had said so, and she had laughed and said the real ones could not, but the painted ones went wherever you kept them.

By morning the pumps had won and the hold smelled of wet rope and tar. Tomas sat on an upturned crate in the galley and unfolded the linen with trembling fingers. The pale stripes on the wings had held. The fine black lines of the body had not smudged. He thought of Ruth's hand guiding his wrist over the cloth, and how she had said that blue was the hardest colour to keep, because it ran first when things got wet.

He pinned it above the stove where the steam could reach it, and when the coast of Nova Scotia rose grey on the horizon he went up on deck to watch for her.