Colour tattoo of two butterflies with teal and purple wings and black outlines on the inner wrist, with a hand and dark glitter nails raised above.

Two butterflies on a wrist

Other · Colour · Photo

Two butterflies are tattooed on the inner wrist, one larger and angled to the left and one smaller and higher to the right. Both have black outlines and shaded wings in teal, green and purple, with lighter highlights along the wing edges. The photo is taken from above on a white background, with the hand and dark blue glitter nails visible at the top of the frame.

Other Butterfly Wing Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull your chair nearer, for the wind's getting into the chimney and I'll not repeat this twice. My grandmother kept the light at Skerrel Point before the new tower went up, and she swore the thing happened the September the paraffin ran low and the glass wanted cleaning. Two butterflies came in off the water at dusk, which no butterfly has any business doing that far out, and settled on the brass rail by the lens as if they'd been posted there.

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The big one had wings the colour of a mackerel's back, green going to teal at the edges, with black lace along them like a widow's veil. The small one sat higher, dusted purple in the shadow of its wing, and it kept close to its larger sister the way a child keeps to a coat. My grandmother said they were tired past bearing, and she knew the look, having been tired the same way herself since Grandfather went under off the Baltic Rock. The fog came down thick as wool and the lamp only threw a grey smear across it.

She had nothing to give them but the lamp itself, so she turned the wick up as high as the chimney would stand and opened the lantern hatch. The beam swept out, the two of them lifted into it, and the light ran through their wings so the fog lit up green and violet all the way down to the water. A trawler out past the bar had been feeling for the channel for an hour. It saw the colours hanging in the murk, took them for a fishing buoy's lamp, and steered by them into the harbour mouth with its nets still dripping.

By morning the butterflies were gone and the trawler's skipper was drinking her tea in the kitchen. Ask anyone on this coast why nobody swats a moth against the glass, and they'll tell you it's bad luck. My grandmother would tell you it was simply good sense.