Black and grey butterfly tattoo on the upper arm beside a cursive script quote across the back, shown from behind.

Butterfly and script quote on arm and back

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind, showing a black outlined butterfly tattoo on her upper arm. A cursive script line runs across her back near the top of her ribs, but only part of the words are legible. The ink is black and grey, with the butterfly shaded in soft tones against pale skin and a grey top.

Lettering Upper arm Back Butterfly Script Quote

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, the fire's only good for the front row. No, I'll not tell the one about the strongman again, he's buried in Margate and he'd sue me from the grave. This is the summer the Pemberton Brothers Travelling Circus ran out of elephants and started keeping butterflies instead. Nobody thought much of it. A circus needs a trick, and the Brothers had already spent every trick they owned.

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The butterfly woman was called Nell Ashdown. She came to us from a dead vicar's glasshouse in Suffolk with a crate of pupae wrapped in wet muslin, and she kept them in the big tent after the lions were sold off. Every night at the finale she lifted the mesh lids, and the painted monarchs climbed up into the lamps with their wings catching the light. The crowd went quiet the way they never did for the knife-thrower.

Then the ringmaster wanted them cheaper. He wanted them fed on sugar water and kept in a box under the bandwagon. Nell told him that a thing was only worth showing if it could leave when it liked, and she chalked a line on the side of the wagon to prove it: all good things are wild and free. Then she carried the crate out at dawn to the field beyond the A-road and opened every lid.

What became of the circus? The tent rotted in a barn in Kent, and the Brothers went to work on the buses. But the butterflies stayed. If you ever find a meadow full of them in August, beside a dual carriageway nobody uses, know that the ringmaster has been dead forty years and Nell is still sending them up.