Black and grey realism tattoo of a monarch butterfly and an ornate filigree heart locket on the forearm.

Butterfly and filigree heart on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A monarch butterfly with detailed wing veins hangs from a beaded chain above an ornate filigree heart locket with a smaller heart inside it. The shading is soft and realistic, with strong highlights and deep shadows giving the metal and wings a three-dimensional look. The tattoo is shown in close, slightly angled framing on a forearm, with a blurred background and bokeh spots.

Realism Forearm Butterfly Heart Filigree Chain Bead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and leave that cake alone, because I'm telling this the way my mother told it to me, with the wireless off and the kettle gone cold. The chain came first. Forty-one jet beads strung on black silk by a glass-blower's widow in Whitby, and every one of them clicked against the banister when you climbed the back stairs of Seacrest House.

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Her name was Hester Vane and she took the attic room the summer the monarchs came in off the sea in a cloud so thick the milkman stopped his cart on the cliff road. One of them got caught in the wind and landed on her windowsill with its wings split at the edges. She nursed it on a saucer of sugared water for three days. On the fourth morning it lifted off towards the harbour, and she found a filigree locket lying open where it had rested, a little heart pressed inside the big one like a seed in a plum.

The locket had belonged to Abel Crane, a fisherman who went out past the breakwater one March and never came back. Hester didn't believe in ghosts. She believed in tide tables, so she checked them, and they said the water had been slack that night, which meant the boat should have come home. Every evening she walked to the end of the pier with the locket swinging from her neck, and every evening the beads chattered in the wind.

On the last night of August a single monarch came down out of the dusk and settled on the clasp, wings folding slow as a prayer. Hester stood very still until it was dark. In the morning she left the locket on the iron rail, and when the tide turned it was gone, and the rail was wet with a faint orange dust, the way a fingertip would leave it.