Black script tattoo reading Carpe Diem with a small outlined butterfly beside it, placed on the inner forearm.

Carpe Diem script with butterfly on forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black script tattoo reading Carpe Diem across the inner forearm, with a small butterfly outline at the right end. The lettering uses fine, flowing strokes with some shading, and the butterfly has a lighter wing fill. The ink is solid black and grey on pale skin, with the subject centred against a blurred background.

Lettering Fine line Forearm Carpe diem Script Butterfly Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sports hall at Cleckheaton Grammar still smells of floor polish, and someone has strung the old house banners across the climbing ropes like bunting at a fête. I have been standing by the squash-ball trophies for twenty minutes, clutching a plastic cup of warm prosecco, waiting for Joanne Pilling to find me and say something unkind about my hair.

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Instead it is Dev Mistry who walks over, holding a yearbook from 1996 with a broken spine. "Found this in my mum's loft," he says. "Thought you'd want it back. You signed mine in the back and I've always wondered what you meant." He flips to the last page. Under a photograph of the Year Eleven netball team, in purple biro, someone has written Carpe Diem, and beside it a butterfly, its wings drawn in three careful loops, the antennae uneven.

I know that handwriting. Lorna Reeve sat behind me in Latin for two years and never once conjugated a verb without sighing. The week before her father's job moved them to Bristol, she told me she would never be the sort of person who waited for things to happen. I laughed and said nobody was.

Dev taps the butterfly. "Did she ever say anything about it?"

"She said she'd tell me when I was brave enough to ask her to dinner," I say, and close the book gently. Across the hall, a woman with silver streaks in her fringe is laughing with her head thrown back. I put down my cup and walk towards her before I can talk myself out of it.