Black script lettering reading Let me be your wings, with a small butterfly outline beside it, tattooed on a forearm.

Script quote with butterfly on forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a forearm with the words Let me be your wings written in flowing black script across the skin. A simple butterfly outline sits to the right of the lettering, with light shading in its wings. The ink is solid black on pale skin, and the arm fills most of the frame against a blurred background.

Lettering Forearm Script Quote Butterfly Wing

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

The brass bell over the front door rang twice before nine, and both times it was only the milk. Ruth Pennock had been lodging in number six since the spring, a stubborn woman with a cough and a tin of wartime sweets she would not share. On Thursday she asked me to post a letter to a nephew in Leeds. I took it from her hand the way you take a bird that has flown into a window: carefully, expecting it to flutter.

Keep reading

She didn't want the letter opened, only carried. Her husband had been a lifeboat coxswain at Whitby, and he had once told her that a man in the water need not be a strong swimmer, only needs someone to hold him up until the boat comes. She had written the same line across the envelope in her thin, looping hand, Let me be your wings, and underlined it twice, as if it were an instruction for the postman.

On Friday she didn't come down for breakfast. I found her at the window of the back parlour with the sea grey behind her, and the room smelled of camphor from the card trays of moths she had been collecting for the children at the church school. One of them had got loose and was walking the sill. She asked me to open the sash. I did, and the small thing lifted off as if it had only been waiting for permission.

Ruth died in her sleep on the Sunday. The letter went to Leeds regardless, and a fortnight later a young man came up the steps with his cap in his hands and asked for number six. He stood in the hall a long while, looking at the brass bell, and then said, 'She told me you'd carry it.' I said I had. I haven't stopped carrying it, not really, the way the tide keeps coming in long after the boats are home.