Shaded grey cross with a rainbow monarch butterfly tattoo across its lower arm, placed on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cross and butterfly on upper back

Traditional · Back · Mixed · Photo

A grey shaded cross with a raised bevelled edge and a small teardrop shape at its centre sits on the upper back. A monarch butterfly with orange, yellow, green and red wings overlaps the lower section of the cross, with black outlines and dark shading on the cross. The ink is mostly grey with a concentrated area of colour in the butterfly, set against plain smooth skin.

Traditional Back Cross Butterfly Teardrop

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wooden cross at the edge of Ashgrove wood had been weathering since before the sexton's father was born, and every October the monarchs came down the valley to rest on it. My brother Tom said they were drawn to the bead of amber resin that hardened on the crossbar, sweet as honey to them. I did not believe him until I counted them myself, the August I was nine, sitting on the stile with a slate and a stub of chalk.

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Mother did not like me going up past the beeches alone. She said the wood kept its own counts, and a child who counted things in it would be kept for the sum. I laughed at her then. I had a tin of pencils, a grey wool scarf and a belief that numbers were honest. By the third week I had reached forty-one on the crossbar and lost my place when a monarch the colour of a struck match landed on my wrist and would not be shaken off.

The following spring the resin drop was gone, knocked away by the gale that took the chapel lychgate. Tom went up with a saw to mend the cross and came down pale. He said there was nothing on the crossbar but a dry bee and a wing folded like a letter. I took the slate up myself the next day. Forty-one, I wrote beneath the old marks, and under it, smaller, the one that had stayed.

Mother found me there at dusk and did not scold. She knelt in the cropped grass, took the chalk from my fingers, and drew a single line down the slate, straight as the cross's stem, to say the count was finished and the wood could keep the rest.