Blue and teal watercolour-style butterfly wing tattoo with a black semicolon, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly wing and semicolon on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A butterfly wing rendered in blue and teal washes with fine black outlines and veins, with a solid black semicolon to its left. The soft tonal shading within the wing contrasts with the crisp black linework, and a thin curling stem extends upward from the wing tip. The tattoo is centred on a pale forearm against a blurred background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mortar was still wet when Hal's sister handed me the trowel and told me to mind the north tower, where the wall had come away in a sheet. I had been at Carrow Keep three weeks, long enough to learn that the stones remembered only what they had been told, and that the old masons signed their work with marks nobody could read. Nobody had warned me about the blue.

Keep reading

Behind a loose block, in a niche no wider than my palm, someone had painted a butterfly wing onto plaster gone the colour of weak tea. The pigment was lapis, ground fine, and it had kept its colour four hundred years in the dark. Beside it, pressed into the lime with a thumb, sat a small black mark: a full stop with a tail, the pause a clerk makes between two thoughts he means to finish.

I thought of Ada, who had written me a letter in March and then, on the second sheet, stopped mid-sentence and never went back to it. I had read that broken line every night since. I had not answered it. I had been waiting for an ending to tell me what to do.

I left the niche open, mixed a fresh batch of lime, and set the block back so only the mark showed at the edge, like a comma at the foot of a page. Then I wrote Ada a single line on the back of a delivery docket: I found a wing that was never finished, and I think it was waiting for someone to pick up the sentence. Take your time, but do come back to it.

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