Close photograph of a black script tattoo reading Love me for who i am across the upper back, with a shaded pink butterfly on the shoulder.

Script quote and butterfly on shoulder

Lettering · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A black script quote runs diagonally across the upper back, towards the shoulder, with a small dark mark beside the words. A larger butterfly sits at the top of the shoulder, shaded in pink and grey tones. The skin is lit warmly against a dark background, with the subject's hair visible at the top left of the frame.

Lettering Shoulder Back Script Quote Butterfly

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

You find the words on the back wall of the lift in Calder House, written in blue biro above a sticker for a plumber who has not answered his phone since 2019. Love me for who I am. The letters lean into each other like they are tired, and beside them someone has drawn a small dark moth in three quick strokes. The lift has been out since Tuesday, so you take the stairs, counting the landings the way your mum taught you, and by the sixth floor the smell of other people's dinners has given way to damp concrete.

Keep reading

On the eighth landing a paper butterfly is taped to the window, pink on one wing and gone the colour of dishwater on the other where the sun has been at it. Someone has pinned a note beneath it: Ruth, flat 14C, pick up your post. You know Ruth. She drew on everything when she was nine, the bus shelter, the bins, the back of your hand in gel pen. You haven't seen her since her nan's funeral, and you assumed she'd gone off to somewhere with a proper train line.

Flat 14C smells of paraffin heater. Her father opens the door on the chain and looks at you for a long time. "She went to Leeds in March," he says. "Left a message on the lift wall for anyone who came looking. Said you'd turn up eventually, being slow on stairs." He hands you a padded envelope with your name on it in her looping hand.

You open it on the landing. Inside is a photocopy of the lift wall and a biro. In the margin she has written: Tell them I was right about the moth. You don't know what that means, so you climb back down with the envelope under your arm, and at the ground floor you stop, uncap the biro and draw one more small moth beside the words before the lift doors open for someone else.