A black silhouette of a woman with red butterflies rising from her head, beside red script on the upper back, reading I am not afraid to keep on living.

Butterflies and silhouette with script on upper back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A black silhouette of a woman stands on the left of the upper back, her head breaking into red butterflies that drift up and across the shoulder blade towards the neck. Below, red script reads I am not afraid to keep on living, with the lettering drawn in fine, slightly drippy strokes. The ink is mainly red with black used for the figure and script, and the photograph is taken straight on, with the skin and tattoo filling most of the frame.

Back Woman Silhouette Butterfly Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pit whistle went at six, the same as it had every morning since the war, but Nell Carrick had stopped hearing it years ago, the way you stop hearing a clock. What she heard now was her mother's cough through the wall, the scrape of the poker in the range, and the small wet sound of Ada crying into the washing-up water because she thought nobody could hear.

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The letter had come on a Tuesday, folded inside a Christmas card that was still a month early. Ada had written it from the infirmary in Leeds, in pencil, pressing so hard the paper dented. I am not afraid to keep on living, she had written, the last line underlined twice, as if it were a shopping list she meant to tick off. Nell had pinned it above the sink. Every time she reached for the carbolic she read it again, and every time it sounded less like a promise and more like a dare.

On Saturday she took the scissors to the red silk remnants the draper in Hollin Lane had been trying to shift since the strike. Nobody in the village had the heart to wear scarlet anymore. She cut and folded and pinched each wing at its middle with a clothes peg until the kitchen table looked as if it had been spilled on. Mr Dawson from the chapel came round for the ribbons, saw the table and went quiet. Nell did not explain. She gave him three wings for the vestry window and kept the rest.

On the Monday she carried them up the spoil heap in a biscuit tin. The wind off the moor took the first handful before she had properly lifted the lid, and they rose over the slag and the terraces and the black chapel roof, catching the low sun like struck matches. Ada's train was at ten past eleven. Nell stood with her back to the pit and watched them go, and she did not reach for a single one.