Two people seen from behind, each with a butterfly tattoo and a script quote on the shoulder blade, in black and brown shading.

Matching butterfly and quote tattoos on shoulder blades

Lettering · Back · Mixed · Photo

Two people are photographed from behind, each with a script quotation on the upper back beside a butterfly. The left tattoo reads Together forever, never apart, and the right reads Maybe in distance, but never in heart, with the butterfly partly cropped at the edge of the frame. The script is crisp black lettering, while the butterflies use soft grey and brown shading with some warm tones in the wings.

Lettering Back Shoulder Butterfly Script Lettering Quote Matching

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry was late again, so I sat on the harbour wall with a paper bag of chips going cold and watched the gulls work the bins by the lifeboat house. Nell's train had come in at four. I had texted her three times to say I was sorry about the sandwich shop, and she had replied with a single thumbs up, which in our family means she is still cross but will be over it by supper.

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We had got the tattoos the spring Dad's boat was sold. Nobody had asked us to. We sat at the kitchen table with a biro and a sheet of tracing paper and drew the same moth-winged shape twice until the lines matched. Nell wanted the words to be the ones Mum used to say when we were small, and I wanted them to be honest, so we argued for an afternoon and ended with the two lines on the paper now: one of us to have the promise, the other the truth about distance.

The lettering was done by a man called Tomasz in a back room above a bakery. He asked us to hold still and then made us laugh by humming the whole time. He charged us less than the price on his board because he had a sister of his own somewhere in Gdansk and said he could tell we would miss each other. The butterflies took longer. He said the wings needed warm brown in them, like the stain on the old pier posts, and by the end we both looked at the mirror and saw the same colour looking back.

Nell stepped off the ferry at last with her bag over one shoulder. She didn't say sorry. She just sat down beside me, bumped my knee with hers, and reached into the chip bag, which was how I knew we were fine.