Realistic colour tattoo of five monarch butterflies descending diagonally across the side of a bare lower back above jeans.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Five monarch butterflies down the lower back

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

Five monarch butterflies are tattooed in a diagonal line, the largest at the top and the others trailing smaller towards the waistband of the jeans. Each butterfly has detailed black vein and border linework with orange wing panels, and soft shading gives the wings a slightly three-dimensional look. The ink is orange and black on smooth skin against a plain light background, with the skin tone warm and even.

Realism Back Butterfly Monarch butterfly Wing Insect

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell,

Keep reading

The apple man came up from Hereford on Tuesday with the last of the Discoveries and a crate of cider vinegar he swears by, and I told him what I tell everyone: the orchard is for sitting in now, not picking. You'll laugh, but I've been sitting under the old Bramley with a flask of tea, watching the monarchs come through. Five of them, one after another, drifting down the row from the milkweed by the gate as if they had an appointment at the wall.

Your grandfather would have had something to say about that. He used to count them the way other men count sheep. Forty-one one summer, he told me, and he wrote every number in the back of the ledger alongside the spray schedules. I found the ledger in the potting shed yesterday, under a tin of creosote, and I've been reading it at the kitchen table like a novel. Most years the count is nothing. Some years it's a wall of orange.

This morning the biggest one lifted off the fence post and went over the top of the hedge, and the four smaller ones followed in a ragged line, each catching the light a second after the last. I stood in the lane with my apron full of windfalls and felt foolish, waving at insects. But I kept waving until they were gone over Pritchard's field, heading south, towards a country I will never see.

Come for the Michaelmas fair if you can. Bring the ledger back with you if you want it. I've written today's date at the bottom, with a little drawing of the lane and a number I'm not sure of. Five, I think. Five going, and the rest are yours to count.

Love, Gran