Two matching butterfly tattoos with black linework and pink shading, one on each of two wrists placed side by side.

Matching butterfly wrist tattoos

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Two wrists are shown side by side, each carrying one half of a butterfly design drawn in black ornamental linework with swirling curls on the wings and tails. Soft pink shading fills the wing centres on both halves, so the two tattoos mirror each other when the wrists are together. The photograph is taken close up against a patterned brown fabric background, with black ink dominant and pink as the only colour.

Forearm Butterfly Swirl Matching tattoo Wing

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The biscuit tin came through my lane on a wet Tuesday, rattling with a bar of chocolate and a folded square of black silk. Declarations are my job, so I unfolded it under the lamp. Black thread ran in curls and spirals across the cloth, and at the heart of two wings someone had worked a patch of rose-pink so soft it looked like breath on glass. Anything to declare, I asked the driver. He said it was a scarf. It was half a scarf, and I knew that before he told me.

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Half a butterfly, I thought, and then I remembered the drawer in my mother's kitchen, the one nobody opened. Two sisters, one scarf, cut straight down the middle the summer before the border went up along the Corrin road. My mother had kept her half folded in a glass case for forty years, and I had never once seen the other. The form on my clipboard said to hold the parcel for review. Nothing on it said what to do with a thing that had been waiting in two countries at once.

I went home that night and fetched the case. At the kitchen table I laid the two halves together. The swirls ran straight across the join, the black curls mirrored like a reflection in still water, and the two pink centres met in the middle as though they had been expecting each other. Nobody would ever have called that smuggling. I stamped the driver's manifest Passed and, underneath, wrote the one word the form had no box for: home.