Two realistic blue butterflies tattooed on the inner wrist and forearm, shown in soft shading against pale skin.

Two blue butterflies on a wrist

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

Two small butterflies with blue wings are tattooed on the inner wrist, one lower left and one upper right. The wings are shaded from deep blue to pale blue-grey, with fine dark bodies and antennae, giving a realistic, three-dimensional look. The image is a close crop of the wrist and lower forearm, with the palm visible at the top and a plain grey background at the left edge.

Realism Forearm Butterfly Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third day at the indigo vats you have stopped noticing the smell, which was the first thing your mother warned you about. Your hands are already blue to the knuckle, and the old dyer, Phaedra, says the colour will not wash off for a month, so you may as well stop scrubbing at it in the courtyard where the neighbours can see.

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Two butterflies come in off the harbour one afternoon, drawn by the vats the way they are drawn to anything that smells of salt and rot. They settle on the rim of the wooden tub, wings opening and closing, and you think they are only moths until one lands on your wrist and stays there, weighing nothing, while the other circles the drying lines three times before landing beside it.

Phaedra says they are the souls of two dyers who drowned off Byblos, come back to see whether the blue they died for has been properly made. You laugh, and she does not. She tells you to hold still. It is the only time she has ever asked you for patience, and so you give it.

When the sun drops behind the sea wall the butterflies lift together and go back over the water, paler now, the colour leaching out of them into the dusk. In the morning the cloth on the lines has taken the dye exactly, and you find you cannot tell which of the two of them was the dye and which was the sky.