Black script lettering tattoo reading 'never settle for anything less than butterflies' across a person's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Script quote across a shoulder blade

Lettering · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a three-line quote in black cursive script, set across the upper back near the shoulder blade. The linework is smooth and even, with the letters flowing into one another in a centred, stacked layout. The photograph shows only black ink on warm skin, with a dark strap in the lower right and blonde hair on the left.

Lettering Shoulder Quote Script Butterfly Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In Polmear, where the boats came in on the top of the tide and the gulls fought over the fish boxes, the old women had a saying that a girl should never settle for anything less than butterflies. Nobody could say who first made it up. Some blamed the sea wife who lived under the breakwater, and some blamed Nell Trevaskis's grandmother, who had turned down two husbands and married the third only because he could whistle a tune backwards.

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Nell turned down Harry Penrose, who had a clerk's post in Truro and a motor car that never once smelled of fish. She turned down Ivo Hocking, who offered her the tea room on the quay and a ring he had bought from a man in Falmouth. "Where's the flutter in that?" she asked them both, and they went off looking puzzled, and the old women tutted and said she would end up with a cat.

In October the Ellen Mary went out in a bad sky and came back at dusk with only two men aboard. Owen Jago had rowed the dinghy out to bring them in, and he came up the quay soaked to the bone and found Nell in the net loft. He had nothing to give her but a flat tin he had kept since boyhood. He opened it, and inside, pressed between sheets of brown paper, were the wings of every blue butterfly he had ever caught on the cliff path, each one pinned and labelled in his mother's handwriting.

They married the next spring, when the blues came back to the cliff. The old women said it was the first sensible thing Nell had ever done. The saying went up over the net loft door, painted in careful letters, and it is still there, though the weather has run the paint so that you have to read it slowly to make out the words.