Black script reading Love me for who i am across the upper back, with a small bird and a shaded butterfly near the shoulder.

Quote and butterflies near the shoulder

Lettering · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a fine black script quote running diagonally across the upper back, from the base of the neck towards the shoulder. A small silhouetted bird sits above the words, and a larger butterfly with soft grey shading sits near the top of the shoulder. The photo is taken against a dark blue background with the skin lit warmly.

Lettering Fine line Shoulder Back Quote Lettering Butterfly Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pell mixed the black for the third time that morning, because the first two had come out too grey for a woman who wanted her words to look like handwriting. Mrs Adaeze Lowe stood on the pavement with her arms folded, watching his brush the way other people watch a kettle. "Lean it more," she said. "Like it's walking into a wind."

Keep reading

He leaned the letters. The cursive ran from the bakery doorframe towards the corner of the window, and a row of sparrows on the wire above shifted along to watch. The words were ones her husband, Tunde, used to say when he came up the hill from the docks smelling of diesel and tea: Love me for who I am. She didn't want them on the shop front. She wanted them on the cream wall at the back, where the bakers hung their aprons, and she wanted a small bird perched above the first word and a butterfly by the last, because Tunde had called her that when she was nervous.

Pell painted the bird first, no bigger than a thumbprint, then the butterfly, which he shaded with a grey wash so it looked as though it had only just settled. By the time he finished, the sun had slid off the street and the paint had gone tacky. Mrs Lowe ran a fingertip along the line of the sentence without quite touching it, then dabbed her eyes with the napkin she had carried in her coat for a month.

She paid him in shortbread and a tin of cocoa. The next morning, when he came back to check the edges, a real butterfly was resting on the wet-looking grey of the painted one's wing, opening and closing as if it were deciding something. Pell stood very still until it lifted, then went to fetch his solvent and left the mark exactly where it was.