Two people press their inner wrists together, each with a colour monarch butterfly tattoo with bold black outlines on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching monarch butterflies on two wrists

Forearm · Colour · Photo

Two wrists and forearms are placed side by side, each carrying a monarch butterfly with orange wings outlined in thick black. The wings are filled with solid orange and have black veins and borders, and the two butterflies are mirrored so they face each other. The background is softly out of focus, with a pink surface and a clear cup of pale yellow drink at the top right.

Forearm Butterfly Monarch butterfly Matching tattoo Wing Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourselves down, the lot of you, and mind the bench, it's older than your grandmothers. I'll tell you about the Feeney girls, who waited on platform two at Sallow Cross every August for a train that never once stopped there. Their father drove the milk lorry and their mother kept the ticket hut shut, so the girls had the platform to themselves. They counted the trains, and they counted the butterflies that rose off the marsh in orange clouds, the monarchs that rode the wind south as if they kept a timetable of their own.

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Nell was the quick one and Bridie was the one who noticed things. One afternoon a monarch with a torn hindwing dropped onto the rail between them and sat there, opening and closing its wings, as though it were waiting for a signal. Bridie said it was tired. Nell said it was lost. They argued until the bell at the crossing rang, and the butterfly lifted and went off after the last carriage of the Penzance express, which was the only thing that had passed all day.

That winter Nell went up to a mill office in Leeds and Bridie stayed with the milk churns. Every August after, they met on platform two with a paper bag of sherbet lemons and a flask of stewed tea, and they waited for the orange clouds to come up off the marsh. Each year, Nell swore, the monarchs flew a little lower over the hedges, and each year the sisters held their wrists together to see whether the wings still matched.

The last August they both came, the marsh was silent and the rails were rusting in the grass. Bridie laid her arm against Nell's, palm turned in, and the two little butterflies faced each other across the join. Then the wind came up off the water, and the orange clouds lifted all at once, and neither of the sisters could have told you afterwards which of them had been the one left on the platform.