Colour tattoo of purple and blue butterflies framing a script quote about wings and flying, shown in two photos of skin.

Butterflies with a script quote about wings

Lettering · Other · Colour · Photo

The tattoo has two butterflies with purple, pink and blue wings, one at each end of a script line. The lettering reads 'I gave her wings and taught her to fly' in the top photo and 'She gave me wings and taught me to fly' in the bottom photo. The black linework is smooth and the colour fills are solid, set against lightly lit skin in two close-up views.

Lettering Other Butterfly Wing Quote Script Text Flying

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ward Six goes quiet around three, when the drip pumps have settled into their small clicking and the corridor floor shines under the emergency lights. You are doing your obs on bed nine when Edith Pryce catches your sleeve with a hand like dry tissue paper and asks whether you have ever been taught anything properly. She is eighty-one, has been here nine days, and has spent the nights folding butterflies from the leaflets on the trolley.

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She holds one up. It is cut from a discharge sheet about hip replacements, the printed words on its wings turned inward so they show only as grey smudges. 'My husband did those,' she says, meaning the wings, meaning the line she keeps repeating under her breath. He worked the night desk at the printworks in Salford for thirty years and taught her to set type when the mill closed and the money went. Every evening she tells you about the little press in the back bedroom, the ink that never came off her fingers, and how he used to say that a thing you have been given is only worth something once you pass it on.

You finish the obs and come back at six, when the blinds are going grey. Edith is asleep with her glasses on. On the windowsill, lined up like a row of small sails, are six paper butterflies, and beside them a folded note in careful capitals: FOR WHOEVER IS ON NIGHTS. Under the note you find a seventh, still flat, waiting for someone to finish it.