Colour butterfly tattoo with black linework and blue and purple wing fill, sitting above swirled script reading Live Laugh Love on a lower leg.

Butterfly and Live Laugh Love script on a calf

Lettering · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A butterfly with black outlines and teal, blue and purple wing panels rests on a large swash script that reads Live Laugh Love. A thin blue line follows the outer edge of the lettering, adding a faint offset shadow. The black linework is bold and even, and the colour is softly blended within the wings against the pale skin.

Lettering Calf Butterfly Script Swirl Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Marigold had been six months out of Bristol when the butterfly came aboard, riding the wind in the lee of the mainsail as though someone had sent it. Nobody had seen one so far from land. Old Tobias Quill said it was a sign of fair weather. The cook said it was a sign of foul, since butterflies never travel without reason.

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Hannah Dorrell, the ship's girl, caught it in her cap and kept it in a tea tin. She punched holes in the lid with a nail so it could breathe, and each night she scratched words into the tin's underside with the point of a marlinspike: live, laugh, love. The men asked why those three. She said they were the only three she could spell without the mate correcting her.

Off the Horn a squall came down with the sea standing up in black walls, and the Marigold lay over until her lee rail was under. Hannah opened the tin on the foredeck with the spray going over her head. The butterfly lifted out, blue and purple in the grey light, and circled the masthead once before the wind took it into the dark. The men swore afterwards that the gale fell off within the hour, though the mate said that was just the turn of the tide.

The ship came home to Bristol with a new foremast and a crew who still touched their caps to Hannah. When her sons were grown, she gave them the tin. It smelt of tea and salt, and the three words were still there on the underside, worn soft by her thumb.