Colour tattoo of a monarch butterfly with blue forget-me-not flowers on a vine, placed on the upper back.

Monarch butterfly and forget-me-nots on the back

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

A monarch butterfly with orange wings, black edging and white dots sits beside a cluster of blue five-petalled flowers on brown twisting stems. The butterfly is shaded with soft highlights and a diffuse dark shadow behind it, giving a slightly three-dimensional look. Colour ink dominates, with the orange and blue standing out against the skin tone.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The coach from Leeds was forty minutes late, so Marjorie Penhale had time to read the brass plaque on the school gates twice. Someone had polished it for the reunion. Her name was not on it, but the year was, and the year was right. She stood on the pavement with a paper cup of tea going cold and tried to remember which of the four tall windows had been the science room, where Gwen Ashby had once set fire to a tin of ether and been sent home with a note that said nothing about the eyebrows.

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Gwen was the first through the doors that afternoon, not the last as Marjorie had feared. She had a grey bob and reading glasses on a beaded chain, and when she saw Marjorie she didn't say hello. She said, "You still keep the seed packets in your coat?" Marjorie laughed so hard she had to put the tea down on a wall. In the autumn of 1979 they had spent a whole lunch hour collecting forget-me-not seed from the verge behind the bike sheds, because Miss Carrow said it would only come up if you planted it where you'd be sorry to leave.

They walked the old cross-country route together, past the allotments and the sagging fence where the monarchs used to gather on the buddleia. Gwen talked about her grandson, who wanted a tattoo, and Marjorie said that at her age she'd rather have a second hip. Then Gwen stopped by the stile and pulled her collar aside to show a small blue cluster above her shoulder blade, five-petalled, a little blurred at the edges. A monarch had been drawn beside it, orange as a marigold.

"Forty years," Gwen said, "and it still blooms in the wet."

Marjorie reached into her coat and found the packet, soft as cloth, and pressed it into her friend's hand.

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