Black and grey butterfly tattoo on a shoulder, with the words I'm a walking travesty but I'm smiling at every thing forming the trailing wing.

Butterfly with quote on the shoulder

Lettering · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded black and grey butterfly sits on the back of a shoulder, with its lower wing made up of handwritten-style lettering that reads I'm a walking travesty but I'm smiling at every thing. The wings use soft grey shading and dark outlines, and the lettering is set in black ink with a loose, hand-drawn look. The top panel shows the whole design against the shoulder and hair, and the lower panel gives a close view of the wing shading and text.

Lettering Realism Shoulder Butterfly Quote Text Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming sideways since six, and by ten the gutters on Corn Row were running like weirs. Nobody was buying. Bev Ashdown two pitches down had given up and sold her last tin of pear drops to a boy for a penny. I stood under my tarp with a box of sodden paperbacks and a cardboard sign that said FIVE PENCE A GO, which nobody had read.

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Ruairi came round the back of the stalls at half eleven with a tray of cut dahlias he'd bought wholesale and had no one to sell to. His van had been towed on Thursday, his wife had gone to her mother's in Stafford, and he had the look of a man who'd been hit by a bus and was checking whether he'd lost his shoes. "Bad day," I said. "Brilliant day," he said. "Look at these." They were beautiful, dripping, the colour of a bruise going yellow. He pressed one into my hand. "Pay me when you're rich."

I asked him what he was grinning at. He pointed at a red admiral that had settled on the edge of my tarp, wings folded, the rain beading off them as if it had no business there. Then at the bin with a dog's dinner spilled round it, the council man in his orange jacket doing a small dance to the tannoy, the gull stealing a sausage roll from a pushchair. "Everything's ridiculous," he said. "Might as well enjoy the ridiculous."

By twelve the cloud had torn open and a thin gold light lay across the cobbles. I sold eleven paperbacks and a kettle. Ruairi wore a dahlia behind his ear and told the fishmonger he was a walking disaster, and the fishmonger laughed so hard he had to sit on a crate. The butterfly stayed on my tarp, opening and closing its wings slowly, grey and black and threaded with light. I packed the sign away and kept the dahlia for the bus.