Two clasped hands with traditional tattoos of a butterfly, a cat head, a heart and a lily on the hands and forearm.

Hands with butterfly, cat and lily tattoos

Traditional · Hand · Mixed · Photo

Two pairs of hands are clasped together in front of a dark garment, showing many tattoos across the backs and fingers. The bold black outlines and flat fills of a butterfly, a cat head, a lily on the forearm and a large flower on the other hand suggest a traditional style, with small fine marks such as stars, a heart and simple lines on the fingers. The palette mixes muted reds, oranges, greens and greys with black ink, and the soft, shallow-focus framing keeps the hands as the clear focal point.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The flash sheets had been pinned to the back-room wall since before the war, and the grey tom that lived under them had sat there so long that the paper above its head had gone the colour of weak tea. Nobody in the Ropewalk parlour could say whether the cat had come first or the sheets. It had a torn ear and watched every needle that came through the door as though it were pricing the work.

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In February, a sailor's widow called Enid came in with a jam jar holding a dead butterfly. She wanted it kept, she said. Pete, who ran the machines, told her he could not keep a butterfly in ink, only draw one. So he lined it fat and black, filled the wings with a dull sea-green and put a red rim on them like a warning. She didn't flinch. She paid in coppers and asked for the cat as well, the same grey tom off the wall, to go beside the lily she already had on her forearm.

Pete drew the cat from memory, though he had been staring at the real one all morning. Its ear came out wrong, so he gave it a notch and a stubborn chin, and when Enid looked at it she laughed in a way that made the stars she'd asked for on her knuckles seem to shine a little brighter.

When the shop shut that night the back-room door was ajar. The sheets were still pinned to the wall, but the space beneath them was empty. On the counter sat the jam jar, washed and dry, with a single small star inked on the glass in Pete's careful hand, and beside it a pawprint in fresh black ink, leading off across the lino and out into the wet street.

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