Realistic blue butterfly tattoo with shaded wings and a dark body, placed on a person's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue butterfly on a shoulder blade

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

A photograph of a large, realistic blue butterfly tattoo on the upper back, positioned near the shoulder blade. The wings are shaded in blues with lighter highlights and dark veining, and the tattoo has a dark shadow beneath it that gives a three-dimensional effect. The background is a blurred indoor scene with green fixtures, and the skin shows freckles and moles.

Realism Back Shoulder Butterfly Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Forty years on, the reunion committee had strung paper bunting across the old gymnasium of Ashcombe Primary, and the cups of squash were going warm on trestle tables. Mr Pryce, who had taught them all to tie their shoes, tapped his glass and asked whether anyone remembered the blue butterfly. Nobody answered except Ruth Calloway, who set her cup down harder than she meant to.

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In Lower Wend, Ruth said, the old women held that every child cast a shadow, and that a shadow could be lifted clean off its owner by a blue butterfly if the child stood too long in the wrong meadow at noon. The butterfly carried the shadow to the hedge at the bottom of the lane and pressed it flat beneath its wings. There it stayed until someone came looking, and whoever came had to know the butterfly's name, which was never said aloud.

The summer they were eleven, Dennis Rowe lost his shadow in the meadow. For a week he walked about looking like a cut-out stood on its end, and his mother kept him indoors with the curtains drawn. Ruth went down the lane with a jam jar and found the butterfly on the lichen, wings open, and under it a shadow as dark as ink, stretched longer than the hedge. She did not reach for it. She said Dennis's name the way her grandmother had taught her, and the butterfly lifted, and the shadow came away folded like a handkerchief. She carried it home in her two hands, and she did not once look behind her.

Under the strip lights, Dennis turned to laugh at something Mr Pryce had said, and his shadow swung across the parquet a half second late, as if it had only just remembered him. Ruth picked up her cup. Up in the bunting, a paper butterfly that someone had cut from blue card lifted at the edge and settled again.