Two matching blue butterfly tattoos on forearms, one with the word Daughter and the other with Mother in script above and below the wings.

Matching butterfly tattoos on two forearms

Forearm · Colour · Photo

Two forearms show matching butterfly tattoos in blue-grey shading with light blue dots and unshaded skin-toned highlights on the wings. The upper butterfly has the script word Daughter above it, and the lower butterfly has the script word Mother beneath it. The photo is taken close up with the two arms stacked, so both designs fill the frame.

Forearm Butterfly Mother Script Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Pip,

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The buddleia by the shed has gone mad this year, purple heads bowed under the weight of them, and every morning a dark-winged butterfly works along it like a clerk checking invoices. I stood at the back door with my tea yesterday and watched it for a full ten minutes before I remembered you'd want the news, not my bird-watching. Your father says it's a red admiral. I say he has never once been right about a butterfly in forty years of marriage.

The hedge is cut, the rhubarb is finished, and I found the old tin of seed packets you labelled in capitals when you were nine. Carrots, LATER. Sweet peas, DON'T EAT. I've planted the sweet peas and I didn't eat them, so you can take that as a promise kept. Mrs Ansell next door is selling the caravan. I told her I'd be sorry to see it go, and she said we were the only people who ever sat in it with the door open. I thought of you on the step with your feet in the grass, insisting the moths were fairies on their way to work.

This morning one landed on the back of my hand while I was writing this at the kitchen table. I didn't shoo it. I held still, the way you taught me when you were small and convinced they could be talked round, until it lost interest in my knuckles and went back to the buddleia without a word of complaint.

Come home at Easter. The gate is staying unlatched, and the sweet peas will be up by then.

Love, Mum