Realistic blue and green butterfly tattoo with black outlines and yellow spots on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue butterfly on a shoulder

Realism · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A detailed butterfly with spread wings sits on the upper back near the shoulder blade, with its body and antennae pointing towards the spine. The wings are shaded in turquoise, blue, green and yellow, with dark outlines and small pale spots along the edges. The plain pale skin and dark background keep the focus on the tattoo, which is centred in the frame with the top of a shoulder and neck at the edge.

Realism Shoulder Back Butterfly Wing Antennae

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The envelope had been opened twice before Dilys Price got it, and both times the officer on duty had seen only a sheet of tissue and a dry crumble of seed head. She tipped it under the strip light in the Dover inspection shed and a wing moved, then the other, two halves of something that had no business being alive in a Kent January.

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Inside the tissue lay a butterfly no longer than her thumbnail, its blue gone to turquoise where the light caught the green. Marit Vos had written on the back of a seed catalogue from Ghent: he always said the monarchs were for children, so this one is for you, so you stop looking at the sea. Dilys read it twice, then ticked the box marked nothing to declare, because the form had no box for grief, and the wings were paper, glued at the body with a fleck of gum arabic.

Her supervisor, Tony, leaned over her shoulder and said it looked real enough to fool a bird. 'Real enough to fool a customs man, anyway,' Dilys said, and he laughed, and she was glad he didn't ask what kind of paper.

She sealed it back up and walked it to the outbound hatch herself, past the dog handlers and the lorries idling in rows. The draught from the open door lifted the flap of the envelope, and for a second the butterfly rose inside it, pressing its wings against the card, before the post trolley rolled it out of sight.