Black line drawing of hand-drawn lettering reading Look for Beauty, Listen with Love, Live to Inspire, with a swirled butterfly, hearts and flourish dividers, shown as a tattoo design.

Look for Beauty lettering with butterfly

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink line drawing of three lines of hand-lettered text: Look for Beauty, Listen with Love and Live to Inspire. A swirled butterfly with a dashed trailing line sits beside the first line, and small hearts and scroll flourishes separate the lines. The linework is uniform black on a plain white background with no shading or colour.

Lettering Lettering Butterfly Heart Swirl Flourish Dashed line Love

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The butterfly came aboard off the Dogger Bank, two days out of Grimsby, when the wind had gone round to the north and the deck was a skating rink of fish slime. I was on my knees in the pound scraping ice from the hatch cover when it landed on the rail beside my glove, wings the colour of wet slate with a swirl of cream in each one.

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Skipper Walt Pryor saw me staring and for once didn't say a word. He had a rule about looking up from the gurry. Look for beauty, he'd say, and the sea would take a man who only ever looked down. I thought it was daft until I saw him crouch beside me, not touching the thing, just waiting while the net came up heavy with cod and the winch whined.

We hauled three times that watch. Each time the butterfly lifted off the rail, circled the wheelhouse and settled back, as if it had been following us for miles and left a line of dashes across the air that nobody else could see. Walt said it was a painted lady, blown up from France on a wind that had no business being so far north. He said it had no reason to be out here and had come anyway, which was more than could be said for half the lads on the Hull boats.

When we tied up on Sunday the butterfly was gone. I found Walt on the quay with his tea going cold, watching the gulls. Nothing to be done, he said, then tapped the wheelhouse glass where someone had scratched in grease pencil: listen with love, live to inspire. I never found out who wrote it, but I have looked at the water differently ever since.