Colour realism tattoo of five monarch butterflies descending diagonally across a person's lower back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Five monarch butterflies down the back

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

Five monarch butterflies with orange wings, black veining and white-spotted borders step down diagonally from the upper back to the side of the lower back. Each butterfly is shaded to show depth and the wings are drawn in fine detail, with the largest at the top and the smallest near the hip. The image shows a bare back with black straps, and the colour ink is bright orange against natural skin tones.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Grandad's ledger had a column for everything that flew over the cliffs, and the column for monarchs had never once been filled, because monarchs did not come this far west. Ruth held the pencil over the August page anyway. Tom swore the orange flicker in the buddleia by the coastguard hut was one, and he was nine, so Ruth had decided she would be the one to check.

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They climbed the stile with the wind shoving at their backs. The first butterfly lifted from the purple spikes, then a second rose to meet it, then three more, stepping out one above the other like someone walking down a staircase to the sea. The top one was broad and bright, the lowest hardly bigger than a thumbnail, each wing edged in the same black lace and white beads.

Tom breathed the word five. Ruth wrote it down, then wrote it again underneath with a question mark, because Grandad always said a count you had not checked twice was just a wish. The smallest drifted down into the gorse, opened and closed its wings slowly, then settled on the stile post an inch from her knuckles.

She did not move, and neither did Tom. When she finally wrote the last figure, the nib skipped where her hand shook. Then the little one lifted, and she understood it had only been resting, the way Grandad said everything that had come a long way must.

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