Black and grey shaded butterfly tattoo across the inner hands of a person pressing their palms together in prayer, with lettering on the wrist.

Butterfly tattoo across praying hands

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two hands are pressed palm to palm, with a shaded butterfly tattoo spanning both hands so that the wings sit on the outer hand edges and the body meets at the centre. The wings use dark outlines with grey and black shading and lighter highlighted patches, giving a soft, dimensional look. A dark t-shirt fills the background, and stylised lettering is partly visible on the wrist below.

Hand Forearm Butterfly Moth Hand Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had sealed the pass for three days when the innkeeper's widow came down to the taproom with her hands held together, as if she carried a coal. Nobody at the Bell at Harrow Col asked what was inside them. They had all heard the knocking on the shutters before dawn, soft as a fingertip on glass, and they knew it was the butterfly that came up from the valley some winters, though no one had ever seen one fly in January.

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Mother Ashby set her hands on the bar and opened them slowly. The creature inside was pale and furred with frost, its wings cut at the edges like old lace. She had caught it at the door, she said, and it had asked her for a bed. Then she laughed at herself and asked the carter, Tobias Wren, to pour her something hot.

Tobias had come up from the lowlands with a load of salt and a debt to settle at the next town. He watched the widow press her palms together and breathe into the gap between them, and he felt the fire in his chest go cold. The wings opened one at a time, dark with the grey of lamp smoke, and each one carried a pattern like a column of figures with a line struck through.

Ashby did not ask him to pay for the night. She asked him to count. He counted until the fire burned low and the butterfly lifted from her hands, out under the door and into a sky that had finally stopped snowing. When the road opened in spring, a bag of silver came up to the Bell with no name on it, and the widow's hands, the old people say, were never cold again.