Black and grey blackwork butterfly tattoos with swirling tendrils on two hands pressed together.

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Matching butterfly tattoos on two hands

Blackwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two hands are pressed together, each bearing a solid black butterfly with ornamental, cut-out wing patterns and curling swirl tendrils. The two butterflies mirror each other across the gap between the hands. The image is black and white, with soft lighting and a dark background that makes the dark ink stand out.

Blackwork Hand Butterfly Swirl Tendril Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last train out of Wrenfield left at ten past nine, and for thirty years Mabel Quaile kept the lamp lit on platform two so anyone walking home over the moor could find the gate. Her brother Samuel took the Bristol service the autumn their mother died and did not come back for six winters. Mabel kept the lamp lit anyway, and the porter, old Haddon, said she trimmed the wick more carefully than the company ever had.

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The butterflies came with the first hard frost. They settled on the lamp glass, black as soot, their wings cut through with a lace like the ironwork of the footbridge, and curling from each one a pair of thin tendrils that caught the light. Mabel knew them. They had flown the cutting every summer since she was a girl, one always going east along the rails and one always going west, so that wherever one stopped the other faced it across the gap.

On the night of the seventh winter the eastbound slowed at the signal and a man stood at a carriage window with his palm flat against the glass. Mabel lifted her own hand to the lamp. The butterflies lifted from the frosted glass and crossed the platform, one to his side and one to hers, and for a moment the two hands seemed to meet through the cold air. The train pulled out. In the morning there was a faint pattern of rime on the rail where the wheels had stopped, and Mabel left the gate on the latch every night after that, because the moths still came, and somebody always came behind them.