Watercolour-style tattoo on the inner forearm with a black semicolon on the left and black butterflies drifting towards the right over pink, purple and teal washes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Semicolon and butterflies on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A black semicolon sits at the left of the design, followed by a loose band of pink, purple and teal watercolour-like washes that trail across the forearm. Several solid black butterfly silhouettes fly along the right side of the wash, decreasing in size towards the edge. The colour is soft and blended, with the black elements providing strong contrast against the lighter background of the skin.

Forearm Semicolon Butterfly Watercolour splash Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the stone is warm where the sun has been at it, and you will want to hear this part before the cloud comes over the col. My grandmother told it to me at this very pass, with the pack ponies blowing behind her, and she stopped at the same place I am about to stop. A tale needs a mark where the breath is taken, she said, or the listener runs off down the hill with half of it.

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So here is the mark. Hanna Verrel kept the bees for the monastery at the top of the pass, and every spring the hives would not work until the butterflies came up from the valley, black as burnt paper, riding the warm air over the scree. Nobody knew where they went when the frost returned. Hanna believed they carried the colours of the mountain up to the sky: pink from the sunset, violet from the shadows, a little teal from the glacier's cold eye. She said the sky gave them back as cloud.

Then the year the avalanche took the lower hut, Hanna stopped. She sat down in the snow with her hands in her lap and would not speak for three days. The brothers brought her broth and the bees swarmed without her. On the fourth morning a single butterfly came down the col, and she stood up and said only, not yet. That was the pause, and the whole valley waited on her breath.

And so the cloud came down the pass that morning, pink and blue and violet, and the butterflies rode it like a flock of letters going home. I will tell you the rest tomorrow, when the light is right. Now go down before the weather turns, and mind the loose stones below the cairn.