Colour tattoo of an orange and black butterfly among green leaves on a forearm, with the script words Diabetes above and Type 2 below.

Butterfly and leaves with diabetes script on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A butterfly with orange, yellow and black wings sits over sweeping green leaves, with black script reading Diabetes above and Type 2 below. The linework is clean and bold, and the wings are shaded with blended colour and dark outlines. The tattoo is centred on a pale forearm against a soft, blurred background.

Lettering Forearm Butterfly Leaves Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The glasshouse at Pennock Lane had not been heated since the spring, but Wren still came in before six to check the chrysalises hanging from the fig rail like small green lanterns. Mr Doyle had left her the key and a ledger with his blocky capitals on every page: date, plant, eggs laid, eggs lost.

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On the third morning of the cold snap she found the ledger open to a page she had not written on. Doyle had recorded sugar readings for the buddleia at the back wall, a column of figures beside a pencilled drawing of a butterfly with orange wings edged in black. Beneath it, in a cramped hand she did not recognise, someone had written: she will only come down for twenty. The leaves outside were bruised with frost, and the figures stopped on the morning he had gone into hospital.

Wren went to the buddleia and pressed the refractometer to a drop of nectar. Eighteen. She sat on an upturned crate and waited, and when the first monarch came shivering out of its case she heard herself talking to it, low, as if it could be persuaded.

It rested on her knuckle for a long minute, wings opening and closing like someone deciding. Then it lifted, circled the lamp, and settled on the last soft leaves of the milkweed, where it laid a single pale egg. Wren opened the ledger, wrote the date, the plant and the number, and underneath, in her own small hand: one more.