Purple butterfly tattoo with a heart-shaped outline in its wings and black swirl detailing, above black script reading I Will Fight, on skin.

Purple butterfly and heart with I Will Fight

Neo-trad · Colour · Photo

A purple butterfly with black outlines and ornamental swirls in the wings, with a heart shape formed within the upper wings. Black script reading I Will Fight sits beneath the butterfly, and the shading is solid purple with black linework on pale skin.

Neo-trad Lettering Butterfly Heart Script Swirl

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

Mrs Ada Pickering kept the dye pots behind the back door of the shop on Chapel Street, and nobody in Hollin Bridge was allowed near them except me. Purple was the trouble. Logwood and alum gave a colour that went grey after three washes, so Mr Pickering sent to Leeds for something stronger, and the parcel arrived wrapped in brown paper with a lead seal that Ada wouldn't let me break.

Keep reading

The week the Elsdon girl's wedding dress came back from the cleaners with a split down the bodice, I sat up with a lamp and a needle. The butterfly was my idea. Ada said a bride wanted roses, but I worked wings onto the lace panel anyway, a heart folded into the upper edge where the wings met, and I went over the black outline twice because the thread kept wandering.

Ada found it at six in the morning. She didn't scold. She turned the bodice to the window, ran her thumb along the heart, then took the scissors to the lining and stitched a line of small black letters along the inside seam where no one would see them unless they lifted the hem: I WILL FIGHT, in her careful hand, the same hand she'd used on price tickets since before the war.

Mrs Elsdon wore it to chapel without knowing the words were there. Ada never told her, and I never told anyone until the spring Ada went into the infirmary and I made her a new coat in the same purple. I put the heart where her heart had been, facing out this time, and left the letters off. Some things you keep for yourself.