Healed colour tattoo of a red and magenta butterfly above a black script name with a decorative capital, with small star sparkles, on the inner forearm in a lettering style.

Butterfly and script name on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A red and magenta butterfly with black outlines and pale highlights sits above a large decorative script name, with a plain outlined capital letter and black lettering. Small pink and red star shapes and fine dots trail from the lettering towards the butterfly. The ink is crisp against even, lightly flushed skin, and the design sits diagonally across the inner forearm.

Lettering Forearm Butterfly Name Script Star Sparkle Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ada,

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You will think me soft, but I have kept the lodger's tin on the top shelf of the linen cupboard, where the damp can't reach it. Mr Pell went off on the Tuesday train without a word, owing a week's rent and leaving a room that smelt of pipe smoke and wet sand. The tin has a cracked hinge and I only opened it to see whether it held anything I could send on to his people. It held a bundle of letters tied with garden twine, and on the back of a tide table, a pencil sketch of a butterfly, its wings shaded in with a stub worn down to the wood.

Every letter begins My dear Amelia, and not one of them has a stamp. He wrote them from the bench at the end of the pier, where the lamps come on one at a time and the gulls go quiet. In one he describes the sky above the harbour wall going the colour of plums, and in another a little cluster of stars he swore he saw sitting low over the water, too early for stars to be out at all. He never says who Amelia is, only that she always said the sea looked like it was holding its breath.

The last letter is short. He says he is going down to the shingle at dusk to see the moths come out over the groyne, and that if the tide is kind he will walk the whole length of the front before the lamps go out. Then there is only a dotted line running off the page, the way a child draws a path.

So I have done what I should have done on Tuesday. I have put a stamp on the bundle and addressed it to the only Amelia in the Gazette's death notices, which was the wrong Amelia, I expect, but the post office has promised to try. Come up at Easter and help me sort the rest of his things. There is a jar of pale sea glass on the sill that I cannot make myself throw away.

Love, Maud