Three people show matching solid black butterfly silhouette tattoos in groups of three on the inner wrists.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching butterfly silhouettes on wrists

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Three inner wrists are shown, each with a small group of solid black butterfly silhouettes of differing sizes. The butterflies have no internal linework or shading, so they read as flat black shapes. The ink is black against natural skin tones, and the photo is framed with a black border.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Jean, I know you'll think I've lost my marbles writing when we sat across from each other at the Crown on Saturday, but I couldn't say it over the sausage rolls. Do you remember Mrs Ashdown and her black card? Every April she cut butterflies for the classroom window without drawing a single line first, just the scissors going round and round. The big ones went in the top panes and the little ones sat low down, where the sun could barely reach them. We were convinced she was a witch.

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When the school shut that summer, she cleared the art room into two cardboard boxes and let us take what we wanted. Margaret grabbed the offcuts, a fat fistful of black scraps, and split them three ways in the back of the bus. Nobody had a use for them, but nobody wanted to be the one to throw them out. At the reunion, Margaret rolled up her sleeve in the car park to show me her wrist, three shapes in solid ink, sized like the ones in the window. Ruth had hers done the same week. I drove home feeling like the only one who'd kept nothing.

That night I went through the biscuit tin in the hall cupboard and found my scrap, soft at the corners and still smelling faintly of the glue we used to stick things to the glass. I sat at the kitchen table with a pair of nail scissors and cut three butterflies without a pencil, the way she used to, until one of them came out looking right. It took me four goes. I'm no witch, Jean, but I've decided that's the trick: you don't plan the shape, you just keep cutting until something flies. Ring me before you go back to Leeds. Love, Pat.

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