Colour tattoo of a monarch butterfly with a trailing orange ribbon and red boxing gloves, on the outer calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Monarch butterfly and boxing gloves on a calf

Neo-trad · Calf · Colour · Photo

A monarch butterfly with black-edged orange and yellow wings is shown in profile, with an orange ribbon trailing from its body. Two red boxing gloves hang from the ribbon beneath the butterfly. The piece uses bold outlines, soft shading on the wings and a small blue highlight, against healthy skin.

Neo-trad Calf Butterfly Monarch butterfly Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Our Dev kept a jar of Vaseline on the windowsill of flat 14, Harcourt House, and every spring a monarch would land on the glass and walk its feet over the grime like it owned the place. Nobody on the ninth floor believed in anything much, but Dev believed in that butterfly. He said they flew from Canada to Mexico, which I told him was rubbish because nothing that small could manage the Atlantic, and he said that was the point.

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The gym was in the car park beneath the block, a strip of rubber matting and a heavy bag patched with gaffer tape. Mrs Okafor ran the Tuesday class and made the lads hit the bag until their arms stopped being arms. Dev boxed like he was apologising to it. She never let him stop early. 'Gloves up, Devon,' she'd shout, and he'd lift them, grinning at the floor.

Then the council fixed the lift and the lift fixed nothing, and the gym shut for a month of paperwork. The day it reopened, Dev was not there. Mrs Okafor stood at the window with her keys in her hand, and somewhere above us a yellow thing lifted off the sill and went wobbling out over the road.

I am telling you this because I keep the gloves on the same hook he hung them on. Red, cracked at the thumbs. I go up to fourteen every spring and open the window, and I wait, and nothing ever comes, and I do not expect it to. I just like to be the one who left it open.