Colour tattoo of an awareness ribbon filled with puzzle pieces, framed by black linework butterfly wings with red accents, on the inside of a forearm.

Puzzle ribbon butterfly on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A ribbon shaped like an awareness loop is filled with multicoloured puzzle pieces in red, blue, yellow and teal. Black linework forms swirling butterfly wings on either side, with red shading and touches behind the ribbon. The tattoo is centred on the forearm against plain skin, with a dark background at the edges of the frame.

Forearm Ribbon Puzzle piece Butterfly Awareness ribbon Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The red admirals had found the split plums before Ruth did, and she stood at the end of the row with a wooden crate on her hip, watching them open and close their wings on the sticky fruit. Tom was already in the packing shed, where the light came through the slatted door in bars. He had tipped the jigsaw onto the bench the night before and was sorting it into saucers by colour, red, blue, yellow and teal, each pile squared off with the care of someone building a wall.

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The box was older than either of them, its lid softened at the corners. The picture showed a ribbon of colour looping over a field of pieces, as though someone had tied a bow in the sky. Ruth had bought it at a church sale the summer her sister moved away, and she had never finished it. Four pieces were missing from the blue edge. Tom had counted them twice and reported the number as if it were a fact about the weather.

Teal was the one that mattered, he said. Without teal the bottom left corner would never close. She walked the Bramley rows with her sleeves rolled up and turned over windfalls with the toe of her boot, wasps rising around her ankles in a low drone. Under the third tree she found an apple split open by a blackbird, and pressed against the core of its pale flesh was a small piece of teal cardboard with a curved tab, as if it had grown there.

Back in the shed she held it up to the light. Tom took it from her without a word, turned it once, and slid it into the gap in the corner. It clicked into place with a sound like a latch. Outside, the red admirals lifted off the plums together and crossed the orchard in a loose line. Tom was already reaching for the next saucer, and Ruth left the lid off the box and let him work.