Realistic blue butterfly tattoo with black wing edging and a soft grey shadow, placed on the upper chest near the collarbone.

Blue butterfly on upper chest

Realism · Chest · Colour · Photo

A realistic blue butterfly with black-edged wings and white spots sits on the upper chest, close to the collarbone. The wings use smooth shading in several blues, and a soft grey shadow beneath the butterfly gives it a lifted, three-dimensional look. The photo is cropped to the lower face, a bare neck and shoulder, and a black strappy top against a plain light background.

Realism Chest Butterfly Wing Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dorrie Hallam had been told not to touch the glass, so she breathed on it instead, a slow fog that cleared from the edges inward until the blue butterfly showed again on its wire. Seventy-one years in the hab ring, and nobody had yet kept one alive past its second summer. This one, the registry said, was a Pale Thessaly, extinct on the surface since the drought, and it had arrived in her care in a seed pod of soil and a child's unlabelled lunchbox.

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The problem was the shadow. Every morning the insect rose a few centimetres off its perch, wings opening and closing with the easy patience of something that had never learned to fear falling, and beneath it a grey smudge hung in the air where a shadow should have been, drifting after it like a second, slower animal. The lamps in the hab were set for flat light, and the shadow had no business existing at all. Her supervisor, a man called Osei who ate standing up, said the projectors were faulty. Dorrie suspected the butterfly was borrowing the shadow from the air to keep itself aloft.

On the ninth day she switched every lamp off and sat in the dark with a torch wrapped in her scarf. The butterfly stayed where it was. Its wings glowed faintly, the blues rising out of nothing, and the grey had vanished. She understood then that the shadow had been holding it down, a weight it had borrowed from the light, and that without it the creature was only light on wind.

She opened the vent to the orchard deck. The wings lifted, the shadow went with them, and for a moment the two crossed the sun-strip together, one bright and one grey, before the butterfly climbed out of reach and the shadow stayed behind on the floor, folded flat like a coat somebody had left for her.