Man in a waistcoat and dark jeans holding a navy duffel bag, with a dark tattoo on his forearm and a butterfly tattoo on the back of his hand.

Tattooed forearm and hand with boots and duffel

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photo is cropped from the chest down and shows a man in a black waistcoat, blue shirt, dark jeans and brown leather lace-up boots, holding a navy bag with tan leather trim. A dark tattoo covers part of his left forearm, and a butterfly tattoo is visible on the back of his right hand near his pocket. The tattoos appear to be in black and grey, set against a pale brick wall and a wooden floor.

Forearm Hand Butterfly Boot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bell for Terce has already gone when you find the bag under the stairs, where Brother Anselm kept it for eleven years, its brass zip stiff with damp. Nobody is supposed to carry anything out of the house that was not carried in. You fold two wool shirts, a Bible with a cracked spine and the penknife your father sent from Keswick, and you do not look at the cloister as you pass it.

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At the lodge gate, Brother Matthias is shelling beans on the step. He says nothing about the bag. He asks whether the bees in the south orchard will need feeding before the frost, and you answer him properly, because that is what he has always wanted from you: a plain answer to a plain question. Then a brimstone butterfly, pale yellow as old paper, comes over the wall and settles on the back of your hand, opening and closing its wings as if counting something.

"The abbot says the first butterfly of spring means a door is open," Matthias says, watching it. "He says it every year, and every year it is only a butterfly." You laugh, and the butterfly lifts away and drops down the hill towards the road, towards the bus shelter and the town you have not seen since you were nineteen.

You follow it as far as the stile. Behind you the bell starts again for Sext, and you find you have stopped walking to listen. The bag is heavier than you expected. You shift it to your other hand and go on.