Small black butterfly tattoo with looping, calligraphic wings on the inner wrist of a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stylised butterfly on a wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo of a stylised butterfly sits on the inner wrist, with a thin body and a fork-like antenna at the top. The wings are formed from smooth, looping strokes of solid black ink, with no shading or fill. The photo is taken close up against a plain skin tone, with a tiled floor and light fabric visible in the background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Porthkennack saw the butterfly settle on the Mary Ann's bow, but by the third week of the pilchard run every man on the quay had heard about it. It was black and small, the women said, with wings drawn in one unbroken loop, and it rode the prow as if it had forgotten how to be heavy.

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Old Jory Penhale did not believe a word of it. He said butterflies had no business over salt water and that the only thing that ever rode a prow was a fool with a tally stick. Still, when the shoal went wild in the bay on the Tuesday, he was the one who swung the Mary Ann round, following a thing none of the others could see, its wings turning over the swell like a pen writing a sentence it already knew the end of.

The weather came down at noon. Four boats were out past the Brisons with the sky the colour of slate and the swell rising faster than the lamp oil could be lit. Jory's boat found the gap in the rocks because the butterfly hung there, and the men who followed the line of its wings came home with their nets half full and their hands still shaking.

On the Wednesday, Jory's daughter Ellen took a length of tarred cord and tied a knot into the anchor rope, one with a fork at the top and a body thin as a thread. She would not say why. The gulls stayed off the Mary Ann's bow after that, and nobody ever again asked Jory whether he believed in the butterfly.

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