Black and grey traditional butterfly and moth tattoos on the inner forearms and elbows of a person with raised arms.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterflies and moths on both forearms

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Several butterflies and moths are tattooed across both inner forearms and elbows, with bold black outlines and solid black fills. The linework is heavy and the wings are shaded in simple black and grey areas, with small highlights left as bare skin. The photograph is taken from the front at head height, showing both arms raised with the figure's face and torso cropped out of frame.

Traditional Forearm Butterfly Moth Wing Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell,

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The moths came to the yard lamp again last night, so many that Mr Halloran swept them off the step with a broom and swore at the lot of them. You'd have laughed. I stood at the back door with the light behind me and watched them batter the glass until the powder came off on my fingers, black as coal dust, and I thought of Mother's tin of buttons we never got round to sorting.

Dad says I'm to stop bringing them in, but I can't help it. There's a big one with a hooked wing that sat on my sleeve for a full minute before it flew off, and I swear it looked at me. Mrs Pryce at the chemist's says moths are only after the light, that they drop dead of foolishness trying to reach the sun. I told her that was the saddest thing I'd ever heard, and she said I'd grow out of it.

I've started drawing them in the back of the ledger while Mr Halloran counts the coal. Black ink, heavy at the edges, the way the printers do the wood cuts for the Sunday paper. I leave a little white bare for the shine. Tomorrow I'm taking the drawings to the barber on Fenwick Street, whose cousin in Liverpool does marks for the sailors on the Birkenhead boats. Don't tell Dad.

Your loving sister, Ivy

P.S. The biggest moth left a wing scale on the lamp glass. I've kept it in an envelope. It's the only thing in this town that has ever come to me on purpose.