Close photo of a black-outlined orange butterfly tattoo with a semicolon body and the script words Stay Strong and Carry On beneath it, on skin.

Orange butterfly with semicolon and script text

Lettering · Other · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows an orange butterfly with bold black outlines and black vein lines on its wings, with a black semicolon forming its body and two thin curled antennae. Black script reading Stay Strong and Carry On sits below the butterfly. The linework is clean and even, the wing panels are filled with flat orange, and the design is centred on a soft, lightly lit patch of skin.

Lettering Other Butterfly Semicolon Antennae Script text Stay strong

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit close, because the wind off the headland likes to take the good bits. You want to know how the butterfly came by the mark on its body? Listen. On Hallow Skerry there was a printer's boy called Tomas Quill who had no ink of his own, only the leftover dots and strokes the mainland sent over in crates. One February he found a small dark stop lying in the bottom of a crate, a semicolon, cracked at one edge, and he could not think what sentence it belonged to.

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He carried it up to the lighthouse, where old Mrs Ferrier kept the library in the lamp room. She told him a semicolon is a pause that refuses to be a full stop. It holds two thoughts that are still talking to each other. Tomas said that was a daft thing for a mark to do. She said the sea was daft too, and it still got where it was going.

Through the spring the monarchs came in from the south, thousands of them, orange as marmalade against the grey rock, and Tomas watched one settle on the crate. Where its wings folded, the crack in the semicolon lined up with its body. He pressed the stop into the butterfly's back, the wings opened, and it lifted off over the water without a sound.

Every autumn after that, a single monarch came back to the skerry with a dark pause on its body and two curled threads for antennae, and it sat on the lamp room sill long enough for Mrs Ferrier to read it the words she kept for it. Stay strong, she'd say. Carry on. Then the wind took it south again, and the sentence went on without anyone needing to finish it.