Black and white photo of a fine line fawn tattoo with a small butterfly on the inner wrist and forearm, with fingers visible above.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fawn and butterfly on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A young deer fawn stands in profile with its head turned, and a small butterfly hovers near its muzzle. The linework is fine and dark with light shading on the body, and the photograph is in black and white, so the piece reads as black and grey. The tattoo sits on the inner wrist and forearm, with the fingers visible at the top of the frame.

Fine line Forearm Fawn Deer Butterfly

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit closer, the lot of you, because the fire is going out and the wood is damp. Brother Ansel kept the kitchen garden at Hollin Fell for forty winters, and this is the story he told me when I was your age and too proud to listen. Every spring a doe came down from the high woods to graze along the garden wall, and in the third spring she brought a fawn so new its legs would not hold it.

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The brothers wanted it gone. The beans were theirs, they said, and a deer was a deer. Brother Ansel would not hear it. He sat on the wall at dusk with a heel of bread in his palm and waited, and the fawn learned to stand at the edge of the rows and look back over its shoulder, as if someone had asked it a question and it was deciding whether to answer. That was its way. Head turned, always half away, always listening for something behind it.

In the autumn a butterfly came late, a pale thing with one wing torn at the edge, and it settled on the stones beside the fawn. The fawn lowered its nose to it. Ansel said the two of them stayed like that until the bell for vespers, neither one moving, and when the bell rang the butterfly lifted and the fawn did not follow. That was the night he understood the garden had never been his. It had only been lent to him.

The abbot found the wall gate open the next morning and the beans reduced to stalks. Ansel never once said whether he had left it open. I have always thought that was the part he wanted us to chew on. Now, the fire. Who is going to fetch the wood?