Small solid black butterfly tattoo on the upper chest, with a hand with french-tipped nails resting nearby.

Small butterfly tattoo on the chest

Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A small, solid black butterfly silhouette sits on the upper chest, close to the neckline of a grey top. A thin gold chain runs diagonally across the skin beside it, and a hand with pale french-tipped nails rests over the chest. The photograph has a warm, faded tone and the tattoo is shown in close, centred framing.

Chest Butterfly Hand Chain Necklace Nail

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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

Nobody on the fourth floor could agree when the black butterfly first appeared. Night porter Dessie Marr swore it was the week the boiler failed, when the corridor lights flickered and the tea trolley rattled all night. Sister Okafor said it was earlier, in the winter the children's ward flooded. Either way, by the time the new registrar asked about it, it had become a fixture, a small dark thing that landed on the sluice door and never on the lamps.

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Dessie kept a flask and a crossword and talked to it the way some men talk to dogs. He told it the bins were out, the lifts were slow, a man in bay six had asked for his late wife twice. The butterfly stayed on the door frame, folding and unfolding, and the nurses learned to read it. When it sat still, the ward was quiet. When it lifted and went round the nurses' station, somebody was about to be called to a bed.

Then one February the registrar, a sharp young man called Pell who had no patience for porters' nonsense, found the butterfly settled on the clipboard he was about to throw away. He opened it to take a note and it did not move. He stood there a long while, and afterwards he never said what he had been thinking, only that he went down to the chapel and sat with a family until the morning.

Dessie still says the moth knew its business. Ask him what that business was and he hands you his flask and tells you the kettle's on.