Fine line tattoo of a swirl heart with an orange butterfly on the inner forearm, close to the wrist.

Butterfly and swirl heart on the forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A small tattoo shows a butterfly with orange and yellow wings outlined in black, perched beside an open heart made from thin black swirling lines. Faint black flourishes curl off to the left, and the heart's tail ends in a loop. The photograph is taken close up and warm-lit against a dark red background, with the design sitting on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Fine line Forearm Butterfly Heart Swirl Flourish

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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

Brother Tobias wanted the heart small. A large heart in a psalter, he said, made the psalms look as if they were about somebody, and the abbot preferred them to be about God. So I drew it the width of a thumbnail in the lower margin of folio forty, beside the letter P, and spent the afternoon on its tail. The tail would not behave. Every time I turned it into a loop it wanted to become a scroll, and every scroll wanted to run on into the gutter where the vellum cracked.

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The orange came from the cupboard where we kept the weld and the saffron, the cheap stuff Brother Aldous ground for the Lenten pages. I mixed it with a drop of egg yolk and laid the first wing in a single stroke, then the second. It was Aldous who saw the butterfly, not me. It had come in through the open shutter at Sext and settled on the wet wing before I had lifted the brush, and it was already drying into the vellum, its feet pinned in the paint like a pressed flower.

I wanted to scrape it off. The wing had printed its own dust across the black line, and the abbot would notice a smudge the moment he opened the book. Tobias came round with a fine brush and outlined the whole creature in ink so the orange would not run, and then he sat back and said a mistake that had been witnessed was no longer a mistake. The thing on the page looked as though it had been there all along.

Years later the psalter went down the hill to the town. A visitor leaned over it and asked why the margin of Psalm Thirty had a moth with an ink tail. I told him it was a butterfly, and that the heart beside it had been drawn by a man who could never make a tail behave. He said it was the best thing in the book. I did not tell him the abbot had never noticed.