Colour butterflies beside black script reading "Your tears will dry, you'll soon be free to fly", a lettering tattoo on the back.

Butterflies and script quote on the back

Lettering · Back · Mixed · Photo

Three or four butterflies in orange, purple, blue and pink sit on the left of the frame, shaded with soft gradients. To the right, a black cursive quote reads "Your tears will dry, you'll soon be free to fly" in fine, flowing lines. The photograph is taken close up on skin, with the lettering and butterflies arranged across the lower torso area.

Lettering Back Butterfly Quote Handwritten text Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The caterpillar had stopped eating by Thursday. It hung from the lid of the jam jar, upside down and still, and Dad said to leave it be, which was what he said about most things he couldn't fix. I sat on the roof of Marigold with my chin on my knees and watched the lock gates across the cut swing shut and open, shut and open, while Nan's cough came through the cabin hatch like a second engine.

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Nan had pinned a card above the stove, her handwriting slanting the way it always did, as if the words were in a hurry to get somewhere. Your tears will dry, you'll soon be free to fly. I had read it so often I could say it with my eyes shut, and I thought it was the sort of thing grown-ups wrote when they didn't know what else to do. She had taught me to pull the stern line tight and to tell a moorhen from a coot, and she never once told me a thing she didn't mean.

On Saturday the jar held only a cracked shell, pale as a fingernail, and a damp orange butterfly clinging to the rim with its wings folded like wet paper. I carried it down the steps in both hands, so carefully my arms shook. Nan was awake in the bunk with her eyes open. I held the jar up to the window and she watched the wings unfold one at a time, slow as a clock, and then she laughed, a proper laugh, the first in weeks.

We lifted the hatch together and let it go. It rose over the towpath, past the nettles and the lock-keeper's bicycle, and took the wind up towards the poplars. That evening we left for the hospital at Hatton, and I did not take the card down from above the stove. I knew the words by heart now. Somewhere above the poplars a blue wing caught the sun, and then it was gone.