Black and grey photograph of a butterfly tattoo on the inner forearm, with a semicolon as its body, the letters AKF and a small infinity symbol below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly with semicolon and initials on wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink butterfly outline with a semicolon forming its body sits on the inner forearm near the wrist, with thin antenna lines above. Below it, the letters AKF are set in a plain sans-serif with a small infinity symbol beneath. The linework is uniform and solid, with no shading, and the photo is in greyscale against a pale, softly lit background.

Forearm Butterfly Semicolon Letter Initial Infinity symbol Antennae

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nan, the thaw came through on Tuesday and took the top off the lower field, so Dad has finally let me walk the ewes down to the ash trees without him shouting from the gate. The lambing shed smells of Dettol and wet straw. I have been sleeping in the caravan by the yard since the farmhouse boiler gave up, and I don't mind it, because the stove ticks all night like a clock that has forgotten what time it is.

Keep reading

Yesterday, sorting the feed store, I found a red admiral in a jam jar on the windowsill, its wings folded shut like a hymn book. Someone had written AKF on the lid in marker, with a small loop beneath. I think it's Aunt Kath's, though she's been gone since October and I'd have thought the jar would have gone to the rag bag with everything else. I'm enclosing the label so you can tell me whether her hand made that loop.

The clincher was her notebook in the kitchen drawer. Every lamb she ever tagged has a line in it: the mother's number, the weight, the date, and then a semicolon, never a full stop. When I asked Dad why, he said she reckoned a semicolon was a sentence that had decided to keep going. I didn't tell him I'd started doing the same in my own book, under the ones we lost.

This morning the stove had warmed the caravan enough, and I held the jar up to the window. The admiral had opened its wings to the light, very slowly, as if it had been waiting for someone to notice. I've left the lid off. Come in March, if the roads let you, and bring the good scissors. We have a lot of sentences still to finish.