Colour tattoo of five monarch butterflies in a diagonal line across the lower back, with black outlines and orange wings.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Monarch butterflies down the lower back

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Five monarch butterflies descend diagonally from the upper right to the lower left across the lower back, each with black outlines and shaded orange wings. The wings show black veins and borders, and the butterflies vary slightly in size and angle to suggest movement. The tattoo sits against smooth skin above a waistband, with a teal top visible at the top of the frame.

Back Butterfly Monarch butterfly Wing Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

They came down the outside of Brackenhall every September, the way the old people said they always had, starting at the roof and working lower, one floor for each of them. Nobody on the estate could say who had first counted them. Mrs Okafor on nine swore it was five, and five it stayed, because five was what the lift could hold on a bad day and the children liked a number they could count off on their fingers.

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Teodor, who had moved in from the flats across the ring road in the spring, did not believe in counting things that flew. He stood in the car park with a bag of chips going cold and said it was the wind doing it, and the orange was only the streetlamps. Then the first one came level with the fourth floor landing, tilted its wings at a window where a girl was crying about a bus pass, and went on down past the washing lines as if it had an appointment.

Mrs Okafor told him that was the rule. You did not chase them and you did not net them. You left the stairwell light on, you opened your window a crack, and when the last one reached the ground it would settle on whatever was nearest, a bin lid, a pram handle, a boy's trainer, and wait until you had noticed it.

The last one came down at dusk and landed on Teodor's knee. He held very still. Its wings were the colour of the streetlamp through the stairwell glass, and when it lifted off he found he had said goodbye to it out loud, which was not how he had planned to spend the evening.