Black ink design of the word Imagine in flowing script, with two butterflies and ornamental swirls, shown as a tattoo flash design with no body placement.

Imagine script with butterflies and swirls

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The design spells the word Imagine in large, flowing cursive script, with a looping initial I and a long tail beneath the letters. Two butterflies with detailed, shaded wings sit above the left of the word and to the right, linked by curling floral swirls and small dot accents. The image is a solid black line and fill design on a white background, with no colour and no body part shown.

Lettering Script Butterfly Swirl Floral Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Hollis gave Ada the job because nobody else in Wexcombe would climb the scaffold in February. The board was for the new glassworks on Tanners Quay, and the owner wanted one word across it, in a copperplate that would make the gulls jealous. She had a brush, a pot of gold leaf, and a rule that said she could not start until the first line was chalked straight. The chalk kept blowing off the board.

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On the third morning a boy from the fish market, Teddy Marsh, stood below with a crate on his hip and asked what it said. "Imagine," she told him. He frowned at the letters as if they were a trick. "Can you, though?" "Only if you hold still." She began with the capital I, looping its top into a curl like the ribbon on a bottle of cordial, and the gold took the light so that the first stroke looked wet.

When she finished the word, her hand had drifted, without her meaning it, into swirls that trailed off into little dots. At the end of each swirl she had dabbed a pair of wings in black size, and by dusk there were two butterflies on the board, one above the first letter and one tucked under the last. Teddy swore they had been there all along, folded flat in the grain of the wood, and she did not argue.

The glassworks opened in May. The owner never mentioned the butterflies, and nobody else seemed to notice them, but on still evenings Ada walked down to the quay to look up at the board. Teddy still counts them when he passes with his crate. Two, he says, and one he hasn't found yet.