Black and grey fine line butterfly tattoo with dotwork circles on the inner forearm, photographed in black and white against a knitted jumper sleeve.

Butterfly with dotted circles on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small butterfly sits on the inner forearm, with one wing outlined in fine black linework and filled with a pattern of thin lines. The other wing is built from overlapping dotted circles and arcs that give it a lighter, stippled texture. The tattoo is shown in black and grey against pale skin, with a knitted jumper and a grey floor in the background.

Fine line Dotwork Forearm Butterfly Circle Wing Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ines, the customs officer at Vell wanted to know why a grown woman was carrying a biscuit tin of dead butterflies across the frontier in February. I told him they were not dead, only resting between the tissue, which was a lie he did not bother to check. He tipped the lid toward the lamp and frowned at the rows of pins, each wing spread flat and labelled in Papa's small square hand.

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He asked about the one at the end, the only specimen not pinned but folded inside an envelope. Its left wing was all fine ruled lines, like a ledger page. Its right wing was made of dots, hundreds of them, gathered into overlapping rings that thinned toward the edge. I told him Papa drew those rings the winter before he died, and that every dot was a place he had sold a moth or bought one, a town where someone had once paid him in bread and argument. The officer held the envelope up to the window for a long time. He said the dots looked like a sky he had seen only once, from a lorry on the mountain road, and that his daughter would have liked it.

He stamped the tin without opening the rest. Then he walked me out past the barrier, where the snow had stopped and the car park was grey with slush, and he asked me to wait while he found a pen. He wrote a date on the back of my form, and under it a small circle with dots inside.

I am on the far side now, on the bench by the bus shelter, and I have let the moth go. It went up over the fence without any hurry at all, one lined wing and one dotted, and I think it knew the way. Write to me at the old address. Tell Mama the tin is safe. Marta