Seven small butterflies in blue and pink ink fly across a woman's shoulder and upper chest, with the largest at the lower right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flock of butterflies on a shoulder

Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The image shows a cluster of seven butterflies of varying sizes, arranged in a loose diagonal trail from the shoulder toward the collarbone. Their wings are drawn with dark outlines and filled with soft blue shading, with one smaller butterfly showing pink and red tones. The photo is taken from behind and above, with a cream strap top at the bottom left and dark hair at the top right.

Shoulder Butterfly Wing Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom, the thaw came back on Tuesday and so did the butterflies, which Father says is impossible in February, but I have seen them with my own eyes. Seven of them, blue as a gas flame, sitting along the top rail of the byre gate as though they had been posted there. I counted them twice because the small one kept darting behind the others. Mrs Pryce from the Lower Farm says it is the old orchard on the hill, the one nobody has pruned since the war, and that the trees hold a warmth in their roots that the rest of us have lost.

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I went up with the bucket of meal and stood very still, which is harder than it sounds with a bucket in your hands. They did not mind me. The big blue ones opened and closed their wings slowly, like someone breathing through a sleeping mouth, and the one with the red-edged wings kept drifting down toward the frozen trough and back up again, as though it had dropped something in the straw and meant to find it.

I think it was the same one that came to the kitchen window in November, the week you wrote that you had signed on for Valparaiso and I had not yet decided whether to forgive you for leaving before the lambing. I never told you that. I am telling you now because the red-edged one has settled on my glove and will not be shaken off, so I have decided to let it stay until the frost lifts. Come home when the ships come in, or don't. The orchard will keep its warmth either way.

Your sister, Nell