Black script lettering reading Forever 18 with a small butterfly beside it, on the lower abdomen of a person wearing a yellow swimsuit.

Forever 18 script and butterfly on the abdomen

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close crop of a lower abdomen showing black script lettering that reads Forever 18, with a small butterfly outline to the right of the text. The lines look fine and even, with soft grey shading, and the skin shows natural texture and creases. The image is almost entirely black and grey apart from the yellow swimwear at the edges, and a hand with a ring rests at the left of the frame.

Lettering Other Script Butterfly

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lettering job came in on a Tuesday, when the heat had already got into the paint tins and the road shimmered all the way to the horizon. The bar on the Sallow Flats road had been selling beer to anyone with a grin since before the highway was tarmacked, and Lorna Pike wanted the old board over the door redone before the summer crowd. She handed me a brush and a tin of black enamel and said, Forever 18, Dessie, make it look like it means it. I told her the county would have something to say about that. She said the county drank here on Thursdays.

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I worked from the top of a stepladder with the sun going white on the pale boards. The R wanted a long tail and the 8 needed two loops as fat as dinner plates, so I pulled each letter in one stroke the way my father taught me, wrist loose, breath held. When the lettering was dry I sat on the step to think about the small space to the right, where Lorna wanted something soft to balance the words. A butterfly, she said. Something that couldn't stay.

I drew one in pencil on the back of a delivery docket, four wings and a crooked body, and I was rubbing it out when Lorna came back with two bottles of cold cider. She studied the drawing for a long time. Then she folded the docket into her apron pocket and said a butterfly was only a caterpillar that had stopped pretending it hadn't been through a few things.

I painted it that evening, tiny and black, with grey washed in along the underwings. By the time the first trucks pulled in, the sign read exactly the way she wanted, and the butterfly looked as though it had only just landed. I still drive that road on my way to the coast. Sometimes I slow down just to see whether it has flown off yet.