Maroon and black butterfly tattoo with fine line swirls on the upper arm, with a beaded chain draped across the skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Maroon butterfly with swirls on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A maroon butterfly with dark outlined wings sits above a cluster of fine swirling scrolls that trail down the arm. The wings have soft shading in deep red, while the swirls are rendered in thin black and red lines of varying weight. The beaded chain across the lower left of the frame adds a dark contrast against the pale skin and warm background.

Fine line Upper arm Butterfly Swirl Scroll Filigree

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Mr Okonedo, I am sorry it has taken three weeks to write. The sketchbook came into lost property on the Tuesday the 4.12 was cancelled, wedged behind the radiator in the waiting room at Thornbury Junction. I would have posted it straight back if the cover had not been so swollen with rain that I could not read your name, only the address on the inside page.

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I opened it on my tea break. Most of the pages were timetables for a branch line that no longer runs, columns of times copied out in pencil, but near the back someone had drawn a single butterfly in maroon ink, its wings edged so finely they looked like lace. Beneath it a run of scrolls curled down the page and off the bottom edge, as if they had somewhere else to be. Each curl had been drawn again and again, lighter each time, until the last few were barely there at all.

I have kept the sketchbook in the drawer under the ticket till for a fortnight. I do not think the timetables matter now. The line those scrolls follow ends at the buffer stops, and I have walked it every morning since the closure, trying to decide whether a drawing like that belongs to a man who meant to come back for it.

So I am posting it to the address inside the cover. I have enclosed two photographs, one of the ink bleeding down the margin where the rain got in, and one of the empty bench beneath the clock. If you would rather I hold it until the spring, say so and I will. Yours faithfully, Margaret Ellery, Lost Property, Thornbury Junction.