Close-up of a tribal-style butterfly tattoo in teal, black and pink on the inner wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal butterfly on the inner wrist

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A tribal-style butterfly is tattooed on the inner wrist, with curled wings in teal and black and a pink figure-eight shape forming the body. The linework is bold and solid, with flat colour fills and no visible shading. The design is centred on the wrist and fills most of the frame against a plain skin background.

Forearm Butterfly Wing Tribal pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody comes back for umbrellas, Mr Pryce always said, so when the blue one came in on the 6.12 from Crewe, I logged it in the ledger and forgot about it. Three weeks later it was still propped in the corner of the cupboard under the clock, dripping onto the lino every time someone opened the door.

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It was Ruth from the buffet who noticed the ribbon. Someone had knotted a length of red thread through the ferrule, and tied to it was a dog-eared card with a drawing in biro: a butterfly with teal wings, shaded black at the tips, and a pink figure eight for a body. Underneath, in careful capitals, WAIT FOR ME AT PLATFORM FOUR. The date was 14 March 1987, which made it older than the ledger I was writing in.

I spent my lunch breaks on platform four. Trains came and went, the tannoy gave out the Cardiff connection in its flat voice, and I kept looking at the butterfly, the way its wings curled as if they had been drawn in a hurry and still got the feeling right. Mr Pryce said I was soft. Then, on the last Friday of the month, a woman in a grey coat leaned on the counter and asked whether we had a blue umbrella. When I said yes, she laughed and said she had been waiting on that platform herself for nearly forty years, and that the umbrella was the one thing she had meant to take home.

She didn't take it. She asked me to keep it for whoever came next and to tell them the platform was the right one, then walked out into the drizzle without opening anything. I tied the card back onto the handle myself. The pink figure eight looked less like a body now and more like a loop of track, the kind that brings you round to where you started.