Pink and red butterfly tattoo with black outlines and curved script lettering across two forearms.

Pink butterfly with script on forearms

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A large monarch-style butterfly with pink and red wings and black outlines sits across two forearms, with its body running between the arms. Curved black script wraps around the wings, though only fragments of the words are legible in this photo. The shading is soft and the colour is bold against the skin, with a teal-painted hand and a metal bracelet visible at the edge of the frame.

Lettering Forearm Butterfly Script Word Wing

Find an artist for this

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 lamplighter of Harrow Lock had two daughters who stopped speaking the winter the east bridge went under, so the town said the butterfly came to them instead. It came at dusk, when the gas lamps along the towpath hissed alight one after another, and it settled on the sill of whichever girl had been crying. Nobody else ever saw it land.

Keep reading

Nell kept the messages. They were not ink but threads of light that unspooled from its wings, and they could only be read in the dark. Every night she copied them into her father's old ledgers: a line about the cold, a line about bread, a line about a boat that went under the weir and did not come up. Her sister Ada would not look at them. She said anything that flew after sundown was a thief of sleep, and she slept with the shutters bolted.

In the hard frost of February the words changed. Ada read the last one over Nell's shoulder and went white. It said only that the river had given back what it had taken, and that the name on the boat's bow was hers, not Nell's. The lamps guttered as they stood there. Nell took the ledger down to the towpath and found the boat tied at the lock gate, its hull split and its oars laid side by side on the bank, as neat as cutlery.

They did not speak of it. Ada sat on the cold stones and read the whole ledger aloud until the chimneys greyed, and the butterfly, pink as a coal in the lamplight, circled them twice and waited. When Ada had finished she took the pencil from behind her ear and wrote one line at the foot of the last page, in her own hand. The next dusk the butterfly came back for it, and this time it did not drift west. It flew straight out over the water and was gone.