Black and grey shaded butterfly tattoo with detailed wings on the upper arm of a person wearing a grey top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey butterfly on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A butterfly tattoo with detailed, shaded wings sits on the upper arm, with the wing edges and veins rendered in fine lines. The body is drawn in solid black with soft grey gradients. The photo is cropped to the arm, a grey sleeve and the lower face, with a plain light background.

Realism Upper arm Butterfly Moth Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The moth came out of the cold store on the fourteenth day of the thaw, and Ottoline Vance nearly dropped the tray. Its wings were the grey of wet slate, edged with a line so fine the lamp had to find it for her. Nobody on Caddis Station had seen a living wing in nine years. We had grown the hab-moss and the algae vats, and the children folded paper bees from ration sheets to play at pollination.

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I carried the tray to the viewing bay myself, past the greenhouse where Mr Okonedo was pruning the lichen beds, and I did not tell him. Dr Halloran had sent the sample up with a note in her cramped hand: Do not open the seal until someone who has held a moth is standing beside you. I had never held a moth. My grandmother had, in a garden on a planet that no longer had gardens, and she told me once that you hold them by the body, never the wings, because the wings come away like old pastry.

So I did it her way, and the wings stayed where they were. The creature lifted its feathery antennae, shivered, and walked up my wrist as if it had an appointment. Under the lamp the veins looked like hairline cracks in glass, and the shading along the edges went soft as ash. I thought of the seed vault we had lost in the second dust storm, and of Halloran's note, and I understood that she had not sent a specimen. She had sent a map of something we had forgotten how to draw.

I opened the bay door to the recycled air and let the moth go. It turned once above the moss, then settled on a grey leaf of the nearest fern, as though it had been waiting for someone to notice the sky was still there.