Black ink tattoos on the back and fingers of a hand, including a shaded butterfly, a leafy vine with a flower, and small geometric symbols.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly, vine and symbols on a hand

Blackwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand held against a brick wall shows a shaded black butterfly across the back, with a line-drawn vine of leaves and a flower beneath it. Small black symbols sit on the fingers, including a cross-like motif, a diamond knot, a house shape and a star. The work is in black ink only, with the butterfly shaded in greys and the finger pieces in clean, solid linework.

Blackwork Botanical Hand Butterfly Vine Leaves Flower Symbol Cross Star House Geometric

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Abara had been drawing on the door frames of Carrow Street since the winter the coal ran out, and nobody had asked her why. Her marks were small and stubborn, a diamond knot here, a little house there, drawn in soot and then in ink once the soot ran out. Dell, who was eleven and carried the milk money on Thursdays, thought they looked like the marks on the old tins in the pantry, and said so.

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"They're not for looking at," Mrs Abara said, not unkindly. "They're for whatever comes up the street after dark and counts the doors."

On the night the moths came, Dell watched from the landing window as one pale thing drifted under the streetlamp, then another, then a dozen, until the air over the cobbles was thick with wings. They settled on the railings and the washing lines and on the glass beside her hand, and she felt no fear, only a faint warmth wherever a wing touched.

Mrs Abara climbed the stairs slowly with a pot of ink and a brush. She did not seem surprised. She took Dell's fingers one at a time and drew a cross on the first, a star on the third, a tiny house on the fourth. "Now you count them," she said. "Whatever comes up the street will find every door already counted, and keep walking."

In the morning the wings were gone and the doors of Carrow Street wore the same small signs, each one a little different, each one carefully kept. Dell still has the ink on her knuckles, faded now to the grey of an old pencil line.