Black outline butterfly tattoo with heart shapes inside the wings and curled antennae, shown in a black and white photo across two halves of skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Split butterfly tattoo with hearts

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A butterfly tattoo is split across two photographed halves of skin, with the wings drawn in black outline and curled, swirling antennae at the top. Heart shapes sit within the wing sections, and the lines are uniform and solid with little or no shading. The photograph is black and white, so the composition shows the tattoo's full symmetrical outline against plain skin texture.

Other Butterfly Heart Swirl Wing Outline Antennae

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Majestic ballroom at Clacton kept its side doors propped open with a bucket of sand, and that Thursday the sand had gone damp and the band was late. Ruby Tennant came in out of the rain with her hair flat to her skull and asked me, not kindly, whether I could count to eight. I said I could count to anything. She laughed and held out her hand, palm up, as if she expected me to pay for it.

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We didn't talk through the quickstep. Ruby led with her chin, and I learned to read her shoulders the way my father read the tide tables, a little ahead of time. Between numbers she told me about a brother who'd gone out to Malaya and a mother who sold wool by the ounce from a shop on Pier Avenue. I told her nothing true. It was easier to be a girl from nowhere in a borrowed frock.

In March she left for Harwich on the boat train with a case that wouldn't shut properly. At the platform she pulled off her gloves, gave me the left one, and kept the right. That was the arrangement, she said. Each of us would keep a half and see who came back for the rest.

I still have the glove. Some nights I hold it up to the lamp, and the darned heart at its cuff lines up with the one stitched into the other half of the pattern. The letter from Harwich in my drawer says only that the left hand is mine to keep, and I have never once managed to keep it still.