Black and grey tattoo of three butterflies on the wrist, with the hand raised against a dark background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three butterflies on a wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of three solid black butterflies arranged in a diagonal line across the inner wrist and lower forearm. The wings have white vein and panel details cut into the black fill, and the larger butterfly sits highest near the hand. The skin is pale against a dark, plain background, and the hand is raised with dark nail polish.

Forearm Butterfly Wing Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lorry had been waiting forty minutes when Marta Kell finally climbed up into its cab, and the driver, a man called Oskar with a streaming cold, held out his manifest before she asked for it. "Stencils," he said. "Commercial. Sign-writers in Lille." She ran her torch along the crates behind the seat, and the beam caught a flat sheet of black card propped against the wall, cut so cleanly that the light came through it in places.

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Three butterflies. The wings were open, and inside each one a network of veins had been left as bare white where the knife had skipped the paper. She asked whether they were for signs. Oskar shrugged and blew his nose. "Old Henri cut them. He says the black is the part you keep and the white is what you throw away, but you can't have one without the other." He sniffed. "Forty years he's been doing it. Says the trick is knowing where the edge goes before you start."

Procedure said she should log the item, weigh it and send the driver through to the secondary bay. Marta read the declared value, read the sign-writer's address twice, then looked again at the three shapes tilted in her torchlight, the largest highest on the card and the smallest lowest, as if they were climbing a wall that was not there. Her hand was already on the stamp.

She signed the manifest and handed it back. "Tell Henri the bottom one's wing is cut too deep." Oskar laughed, the laugh turning into a cough, and pulled the door shut. When the lorry rolled towards the barrier she stood in the cold and watched its rear doors, and for a moment she could have sworn two dark shapes lifted from the gap under the tarpaulin and drifted off over the car park lights.