Colour realism tattoo of a pink and blue butterfly with a grey cast shadow, sitting on a person's shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

3D butterfly on a shoulder

Realism · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A butterfly with pink, blue and black wings is tattooed on a shoulder, with black and grey shading that gives it a raised, three-dimensional look. A soft grey shadow falls beneath the wings, suggesting the butterfly hovers above the skin. The tattoo sits against a dark background, with a hand and a ring resting at the upper right of the frame.

Realism Shoulder Butterfly Wing Shadow Ring

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The miller's son had promised to bring the ring before the bells, and the whole valley of Hallow Brook knew it, because he had told the cooper, who told everyone. On the morning of the wedding the ring was not in his pocket. He searched the mill, the cart, the sacks of barley. Old Brenna Pike, who kept bees above the weir, only said that a thing lost in June is found in August, and went back to her hives.

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The bride, Ottilie, sat on the stone wall with her shawl over her shoulders and watched a butterfly circle the hawthorn. It was a striped thing, pink and blue like a sugared plum, and it kept settling near her and lifting off again before anyone could look at it properly. When it landed on the wall beside her hand, its shadow slid across the lichen and fell not down but up, climbing the stone as if the sun stood behind it.

She followed the shadow. Behind the wall, under a flat slate, lay the ring, bright in a nest of wool where the miller's son had hidden it years before, when he was a boy stealing from his mother's basket. Ottilie slipped it onto her own finger, laughed, and carried it round to the church herself. The butterfly followed as far as the lych gate, then flew back to the hawthorn and waited there for nobody.

At the feast Brenna said that a shadow shows where a thing is going to be, not where it has been. The miller's son stood up to make his speech, reached for his ring on the tablecloth, and found his bride already wearing it, turning her hand so the light caught the band.