Two stacked photos of healed script tattoos: the upper one shows a grey butterfly and the words You'll never know dear, the lower one shows a blue flower and the words how much I love you.

Butterfly and script quote tattoos

Lettering · Mixed · Photo

The top photo shows a grey-shaded butterfly and a small bird above a cursive script reading "You'll never know dear". The lower photo shows a blue flower beside a cursive script reading "how much I love you...". The lettering is fine and even, with soft shading on the butterfly and the flower, and the skin tone is pale against the ink.

Lettering Butterfly Bird Flower Script Quote Moth

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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

The capsule came up the lift shaft wrapped in wax the colour of old rust, and Teodora Vance knew it was from her brother before she broke the seal. Nobody else on the seed deck still wrote by hand. Ilya had always said paper outlasted promises. The sheet inside was thin as a moth's wing, written in pencil and slanting hard to the right, the way he wrote when he was angry or trying not to laugh.

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Two lines sat at the top in looping, careful script: You'll never know dear. In the margin, crowded so tight the letters nearly touched, he had drawn a small bird in flight and a moth with its wings spread. The moths were what the ring crews bred to pollinate the bean terraces, grey as dust and stupid with lamplight, and one had followed her from the grow-racks and settled on the capsule lid as if it had been waiting. She sat on the cold step and read the line again while the pumps moved water through the ring with a sound like breathing.

The rest was on the back. He had been sent out on the survey run the year the ring sealed, and the relay had taken forty years to bring his words home. He was sorry about the argument on the last shift. He had kept the rest of what he meant to say for the day they met again, the way you keep a seed in your pocket until the ground is ready. At the bottom, pressed so hard the pencil had torn the paper: how much I love you...

She pinned the sheet above her bunk with a bent staple, then climbed to the terrace hatch and cranked it open. The air smelled of wet soil and something sweet. She waited until the moth lifted off the lid, unsteady at first, and let it go into the green. It climbed past the lamps toward the dark where the survey ships were, as if it had always known the way.