Black tribal-style butterfly tattoo with a swirl and a dot on the back of a hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal butterfly on the back of a hand

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A black tattoo of a stylised butterfly with bold, tapering tribal-like wings sits on the back of a hand. A curling swirl and a small comma-shaped dot form the lower part of the design. The linework is solid black ink on pale skin, set against a plain grey background.

Hand Butterfly Swirl Tribal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruddock swore the black thing on the porthole glass was a moth, and nobody on the trawler's galley crew would tell him he was wrong, because nobody wanted a moth at sea any more than they wanted the skipper's temper on a Tuesday. I told them all to sit down and let the kettle finish. It was a narrow, ragged creature, its wings pulled out sharp as the blades of a bread knife, and at the foot of it something curled round like the steam that rose off the urn every time we opened the hatch.

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It had come in with the coal dust off the last tip at Hull, I reckoned, or maybe out of the oilskins that hung drying over the stove. Ruddock wanted it killed. Young Pascoe wanted it kept for luck, and went as far as bringing me a sugar lump on a saucer. I took neither view. I took a tea towel and lifted the glass latch, and the wind came in cold enough to make my eyes run, and the thing lifted off the pane as if it had been waiting for permission.

It didn't go far. It settled on the back of my hand, light as a stitch, and I saw the small dark spot near its tail was only a fleck of soot from the flue, shaped like a comma by the way it had landed. Ruddock said that was the worst sign of all, a thing that looked like punctuation, because it meant the sea had something to say and wasn't finished. I told him the sea could say what it liked while the herring was on.

We got her into Grimsby on the Thursday with a full hold and no weather. Before I went ashore I wiped the porthole clean and chalked the day's menu on the slate: herring, tea, bread. Under it I left a little curl in the chalk, out of habit, and then I opened the door and let the last of the warm air out to the gulls.