Black tribal-style butterfly tattoo with curling swirls on the inner wrist, photographed with the palm facing up.

Butterfly and swirls on a wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black butterfly with spiral-curled wings and a slender body sits on the inner wrist, with swirling tendrils extending up toward the palm and down toward the forearm. The linework is bold and uniform, filled with solid black ink and no shading. The photo is a close, front-on view against a dark polka-dot fabric and a wooden floor.

Forearm Butterfly Swirl Scroll Tribal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boat would not leave until the tide turned, and the tide would not turn while Morag Dunn stood in her doorway with the lamp. She had promised her sister's boy a safe road across the bog to the fair at Kilbrannan, and a promise on Corra was a stone you carried in your apron. So she went back inside for the silver thread that had been her mother's and sat by the fire pulling it fine.

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The old women said the butterflies of Corra were not butterflies at all but the drowned men of the cliffs, who came up each spring to look at the houses they had left. Morag did not believe it. She believed in thread and in the cut of a wing. Still, when she drew the first loop on the linen, her hand curled the line over on itself, and again, and the wings went round like bracken unfurling in May, and the body came out thin as a needle.

At the quay the boy waited with his cap in his fists. She pinned the linen to his shirt cuff. 'Keep it where the pulse is,' she said, 'so the sea knows whose it is.' He laughed, the boat went out on the turn, and she stood on the wall until the sails were gone.

That night a moth knocked at her window, pale as paper, then another, until the glass was crowded with them. She lifted the sash. They did not come in. They turned toward the fair road and rose, each one trailing a fine curl of light, and she knew the boy would reach the fair dry. She went to bed and slept, for the first time since autumn, without listening for the water.