Black and grey fine line butterfly tattoo with patterned wings on the inner wrist, photographed in black and white.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small butterfly on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small butterfly with outstretched wings and thin antennae is tattooed on the inner wrist, seen from the palm side of the hand. The wings are outlined in fine black linework and filled with a dense pattern of dots and short strokes. The image is in black and white, and the butterfly sits centrally in the lower half of the frame against pale skin.

Fine line Dotwork Forearm Butterfly Wing Antennae Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mae had been dotting the same wing for three hours when the lock keeper hailed the barge to say the water was dropping. She did not look up. The Constance sat low in the cut below Denham Weir, her hold stacked with bricks, and on the cabin table lay her father's notebook, open at a moth-pale sketch he had made the summer before the river took his boat. Beneath it, in his square capitals, he had written: WINGS ARE ONLY DOTS THAT AGREED TO STAY.

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She had copied the sketch with a steel nib and a bottle of Indian ink, one dot at a time, until the page looked like frost on a window. The lock keeper's boy came aboard to say the gates would open at four. He asked what she was making. She told him a butterfly, and he laughed, because nothing in the brickwork of the Constance had ever looked likely to fly.

At four the gates groaned and the barge slid into the chamber. Mae stood at the rail with the page pressed flat against her coat so the ink would not smudge in the damp. Water boiled round the hull like something let out of a kitchen sink. She thought of her father's antennae, drawn with a single hair of a brush, and how he had insisted they were the only lines that needed to be straight.

When the upper gates swung open, a red admiral came off the towpath and crossed the water, settling on the rail beside her hand. It opened and closed its wings, dark spots on dark orange, exactly as the notebook had said. Mae did not move. She counted the dots, got to eleven, and let the barge carry them both upriver.