Two stacked photos of a lettering tattoo on skin, a script quote with a purple butterfly at each end, placed along the side of the body.

Butterfly and script quote on skin

Lettering · Other · Mixed · Photo

Two stacked photographs show a script quotation tattoo on skin, reading 'I gave her wings and taught her to fly' above and 'She gave me wings and taught me to fly' below, with a purple butterfly at each end. The lettering is drawn in a fine to medium weight script with smooth, consistent linework and dark ink. The butterflies are filled in purple and pink tones, and the photos are close crops that show the curve of the skin.

Lettering Other Script Quote Butterfly Wing Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell,

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I'm writing this at the kitchen table at half one in the morning, because the last bus has gone past on Attercliffe Road and the city has that thin, rinsed quiet it only gets after midnight. Your dad would tell me to go to bed. Instead I've got the old shoebox open in front of me, the one with the cellophane window gone yellow, and the lid with two holes you punched in it with a compass point when you were seven.

Do you remember the day you bought those caterpillars off the stall in Sheffield market? Three pounds for a little plastic tub, and you carried it home on the bus like it held the Crown Jewels. By the end of the month there were two purple butterflies opening and closing their wings on the kitchen windowsill. You stood on the back step, lifted the lid, and wouldn't let me touch it. "You have to do it yourself, Mum," you said, very serious, and I think that was the first time I understood how closely you'd been listening to everything I said.

You rang me on Tuesday from Manchester and asked why I never told you how hard it was to leave the nest. I didn't have an answer then. I have one now, and it's that I was frightened of the stepping off too. Teaching you to fly was never the hard part. Letting go was.

So I'm sending you the lid. Turn it over. I wrote your name on the inside in purple felt tip, the same shade as those wings, and underneath, small enough that you'd have to look twice, I wrote: go on.

Love, Mum