Small purple butterfly tattoo with a black outline and black accents on the inner wrist of a hand.

Small purple butterfly on inner wrist

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A small butterfly is tattooed on the inner wrist, shown in side view with two lavender-purple wings and a pink body area. Bold black outlines and black markings define the wings and the head. The photograph is taken at close range against a plain skin background, with the tattoo as the clear focus.

Forearm 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

Sit down, sit, the queue won't move before the dogs have finished with the lorries, and I have told this to nobody in a hurry. Forty years I sold coffee from this hut to men with papers in their coats, and every morning the same small thing came to the barrier pole before the first van.

Keep reading

It was a butterfly the colour of wet lavender, with black dots at its head and a pink smudge where its body should have been. Old Tomas on the east gate swore it was the ghost of a clerk shot for smuggling letters across the wire. He would not let the boys swat it. He said a thing that crosses lines on its own has earned its stamp. So every dawn he tapped the pole twice with his biro, and the butterfly sat on the red paint and waited for the wood to lift.

One February the officers from the capital arrived with a new list of names and told Tomas to hand over his ledger. He had written the same numbers for twenty years in a hand so small nobody could read it. That morning he carried the ledger out to the pole and opened it on the paint, and the butterfly walked across the page as if checking the spelling. Then it lifted and flew over the wire into the other valley, where nobody had ever thought to check anything.

They never found the last page. Tomas retired to the hills and his nephew runs the hut now. When the barrier rises, look at the pole. You will see a fleck of lavender paint the men with clipboards cannot account for. Pay your toll and go on, friend. The gate is open, I promise you that. The wood only sticks in the cold.