Realistic magenta monarch butterfly tattoo with black edging and a script name beneath it, shown on the top of a foot in three photos.

Magenta monarch butterfly on a foot

Realism · Other · Colour · Photo

A three-panel collage shows the same tattoo on the top of a bare foot, with a magenta and black monarch butterfly above a cursive script word. The butterfly has shaded wings with white dots along the black borders, and a soft grey shadow sits beneath it to suggest depth. The photos are taken from slightly different angles against a silver plastic-covered surface.

Realism Other Butterfly Monarch butterfly Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The butterfly had ridden on the dashboard of the Bedford since the last petrol station, wings folded shut like a pair of stained glass windows, and Ruth had stopped trying to shoo it out. Forty miles of nothing lay ahead, the tarmac bleaching white under a sky with no weather in it. Her father used to say monarchs did not belong out here. They belonged to milkweed and cold coastal pines, to places that remembered rain.

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Tomas had his boots up against the glovebox and was reciting the tyre pressures from a leaflet he'd found under the seat. Each time the engine laboured on a rise, the heat lifted the butterfly off the vinyl and it drifted to the windscreen, and the sun threw its shadow down onto the road ahead. The shadow was grey and soft at the edges, far darker than any shadow a thing that small should cast, and it ran in front of them like someone clearing the way.

At the dry wash where the road dipped, the shadow stopped. The butterfly settled on a flat stone beside a rusted sign that had lost its town, and Ruth pulled onto the verge without deciding to. Under the stone was a seep of brown water no wider than a hand. Tomas knelt and drank from his cupped palm, laughing at himself, and the butterfly opened its wings once, as if to show them the colour it had been keeping.

When they drove on, the shadow was back on the road, leaning ahead of the truck, and Ruth kept her eyes on it all the way to the next junction. She could not have said which of them was following which.