Two butterflies with purple and orange wings, split across the tops of a pair of feet, with black script lettering above and below them.

Butterfly and script quote across both feet

Lettering · Other · Mixed · Photo

A pair of bare feet on a wooden floor, with a matching tattoo split across both. Two butterflies with purple outlines and orange and yellow wings sit between black curled swirls and dots, and black cursive script runs in lines above and below them. The lettering is fine and even, and the wing colour is the only colour in the image.

Lettering Fine line Other Butterfly Swirl Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry was already sounding its horn when Nell found the tin under Bridie's bed, the one with the cracked lid and the paper butterflies inside. There were eleven of them, folded from the backs of old tide tables and coloured in with whatever the dye-shop had thrown out: marigold, plum, a scorched orange like the sky over the breakwater. Bridie had cut them every winter since they were girls, and every one had a twin hidden somewhere else in the tin.

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'You'll miss it,' Nell said. 'The boat, I mean.' Bridie was buttoning a coat two sizes too big, their father's, and didn't look up. 'I'll miss the kettle. The boat can go to Glasgow without me.' She took the tin from her sister's hands, lifted out the last pair, and tore it neatly down the middle so each wing stayed attached to a different scrap of paper. One half she pressed into Nell's palm. The other she tucked into her coat pocket, over her heart, where the ferryman would not see it.

Nell kept her half on the windowsill above the sink for three years. The wind off the harbour rattled the glass most nights, and she told it the same things she told the kettle: that the house was still standing, that the gulls had nested on the chimney again. Letters came, short ones, written on the backs of shipping forms. Each ended with the same line in pencil, and each time Nell read it aloud to the empty kitchen before she put the kettle on.

The spring Bridie came home, she walked up the lane with a suitcase in one hand and her other hand held flat against her coat. Nell didn't ask. She went to the sill, took down her half, and laid it on the table beside the other. The orange wings met along the tear as if the paper had never been apart, and for a while neither of them said anything at all.