Two black and grey butterflies with turquoise spots and wing edges, tattooed on the inner wrist and forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two butterflies on a wrist

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Two butterflies sit one above the other on the inner wrist, one angled upward and one lower, with antennae extended. The wings are shaded in black and grey with soft gradients, and turquoise fills the spots and wing bands. The plain dark background keeps the focus on the tattoo.

Forearm Butterfly Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cabinet had forty-one drawers, and Aunt Hester kept the blue-spotted pair in the bottom left, where the scullery light never reached. Her brother had sent them from Tabasco in a tin lined with cotton wool, their wings dark as wet slate and dotted with turquoise like chips of sea glass. Nobody had opened that drawer since the funeral, so when Jo came round for the good scissors, the glass lifted with a sigh that smelled of camphor.

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Under the lower butterfly lay a folded paper, thin as onion skin, in her uncle's careful capitals: WHEN THE WIRES GO SLACK, PIN THEM HIGHER. Jo read it twice. The glue had yellowed at the hinge of the left wing, and she could see where a pin had been pushed in crooked decades ago, when the family still believed patience was a trade you could learn.

She didn't have the nerve for the pins. Instead she carried the drawer to the window and tilted the paper to the light, reading the rest: a column of dates, a postcode in Bradford, and a line about a bus ticket hidden in the second tray. She found it there, soft as a leaf, with her own name written across the back. The bus was the 36 to Halifax. The date was Saturday.

On Saturday she sat on the bottom step of the church hall with the drawer across her knees and the air from the open door stirring the lower wing. She set the upper one a finger's width higher, as the note said, and let the pair face the same way, as if they had only ever been waiting for someone to tell them which direction the sky was.