Close-up of a forearm with a small gold metallic butterfly temporary tattoo and a thin copper band and a blue band around the wrist.

Gold butterfly and bands on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A close-up of a pale forearm, angled from the wrist towards the elbow, against a light wooden floor. A small gold metallic butterfly with textured, foil-like wings sits on the forearm, with a thin copper band and a thin turquoise band encircling the wrist area. The image is sharp and evenly lit, with warm gold tones contrasting with the bright blue band.

Forearm Butterfly Band Metallic Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gold leaf had to be beaten before the frost came down off the ridge, Marta's father always said, or it would crack like old varnish. So she worked at the bench behind the mill with the beech trees pressing close to the back wall, their mast rattling on the tin roof all through October, and she counted the taps of the hammer the way other people counted rosary beads.

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Every autumn the village left small offerings at the boundary stone where the path went into the forest: a heel of bread, a candle end, a scrap of foil shaped like a moth. Nobody remembered why. The stone was older than the church. The stranger who came that year wore a coat too thin for the weather and asked for one butterfly, only one, and a length of copper wire to bind its wings to the thin blue ribbon he carried. He would not say who it was for.

She cut the wings from the leaf with a blade warmed on the stove, pressed the copper round them and tied the ribbon tight. When she looked up he had gone, the lamp had guttered out, and the path into the trees was dark. She set the butterfly on the sill to dry.

At first light the sill was empty. A single gold wing lay on the floorboards beside the bench, still warm, as though it had been carried out of the trees and dropped. She picked it up. Her fingertips came away bright, and she sat with the metal on her palm until the mill wheel started turning and the first beech nut of the day struck the roof.