Colour tattoo of a teal butterfly and a peach awareness ribbon with a small grey script word on the wrist.

Butterfly and awareness ribbon on a wrist

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A teal and blue butterfly sits beside a peach awareness ribbon, with a small grey script word to the right, all on the wrist. The wings use soft shading with dark outlines, while the ribbon is shaded in peach and pale orange. The design is centred on the wrist against plain skin.

Forearm Butterfly Awareness ribbon Ribbon Script Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain has been coming sideways since eight, and the tarpaulin over your stall has sagged into a bowl that spills onto the paper flowers every time a pram bumps the pole. You are stacking tins of enamel paint when the girl from the bakery stall ducks under your awning, hood dripping, holding a paper cup of tea she has forgotten to drink. She asks if you still have any of the butterfly pins. You do, though you had stopped putting them out, because nobody in this town buys butterflies in February.

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She wants the peach ribbon beside it, the awareness kind, and she wants it on the same card, not in a box. Her fingers are cold, so you do the work yourself at the folding table, cutting the ribbon from a spool you bought for a christening that never happened. The blue wings go on first, then the peach loop tucked under them so the two colours seem to be arguing gently about which one leads. When she asks you to write a word beside them, you take the grey pencil from behind your ear and letter it small, the way your mother used to write labels on jam jars. She watches the pencil the whole time, and when the last stroke lands she exhales as if she has been holding her breath since the bus.

She pays in coppers, counting them twice, and says she will come back Thursday to tell you whether the blue has the right shade. Then she is gone into the grey, and the rain goes on drumming on the tarpaulin. You slide the last spare butterfly into the tin under the counter, the one you had meant to keep for yourself, and close the lid on it. Out in the wet, the paper flowers are going soft and brown, but the card on the table is still perfectly dry.