A pink and black butterfly tattoo spans two forearms, with script lettering curving around its wings on each arm.

Matching butterfly and script forearm tattoos

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A matching butterfly tattoo is split across two forearms, with the wings in pink, red and black and white highlights. Fine black script curves around the butterfly on each arm, with words that are partly visible and partly cut off by the frame. The colour is bold against the skin, and the composition is close and centred on the design.

Lettering Realism Forearm Butterfly Script Wing Quote Matching Pair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, because the lift at Hollin House has stuck again, and that is how this begins, with two girls and a tin of pear drops stuck between the ninth floor and the tenth. Nora was eleven and Bee was eleven, and they had been friends since their mothers shared a pram in the car park, which is to say since before either of them could keep a secret.

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When the lift shuddered, a butterfly came in through the gap in the doors. It was a red and black thing with white spots along its edges, and it had no business on the fourteenth floor in February. Bee caught it in her cupped hands and said it must be lost, same as them. Nora said it was only passing through. They argued about this for forty minutes, until the engineer prised the doors apart, and by then the butterfly had gone out through the grille into the stairwell, and neither of them had seen which way.

Bee moved to Leeds the summer they turned twelve. The letters came written on the backs of council forms, and every one of them ended with the same line about how long she wanted to be Nora's friend. Nora kept them in a shoebox under her bed, and when she was grown and had a biro of her own, she wrote back the same way.

When the flats came down, Nora climbed the stairs one last time to the fourteenth floor. Taped under the lift buttons was a scrap of paper with half a butterfly drawn in biro, and beside it, in Bee's round hand, the words that ran off the edge. Nora had her own half folded in her coat pocket. She laid it against the drawing, and the two wings closed over the gap like the lift doors, though I will grant you the lift never did.