Colour tattoo of a monarch butterfly resting on an orange awareness ribbon with script letters, placed on a person's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Monarch butterfly and ribbon on upper back

Back · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a monarch butterfly with black wings, white spots and orange panels, perched above an orange ribbon that loops beneath it. The ribbon has grey shading to suggest folds, and two script letters are worked into its lower section. The butterfly is placed on the upper back and sits against plain skin with the shoulder blade visible at the edge of the frame.

Back Butterfly Monarch butterfly Ribbon Awareness ribbon Script letter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tags came in a padded envelope from a county in Ontario, four hundred of them, each no bigger than a fingernail paring, and Nell spent the first cold evening of October at the kitchen table with a magnifier and a pot of glue, mapping the hedgerow on the back of a seed catalogue. Her father had marked every monarch he ever found on the Scar with a pencil dot. She meant to do better than dots.

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By the second week the milkweed by the old railway bridge had gone to silver fluff, and clusters of orange hung off the willows like spilled marmalade. Owen drove up from Leeds on the Sunday with a roll of orange ribbon from the haberdasher in Skipton and tied a bow to the gate at the bottom of the lane, the way their mother used to tie them to the bird table when she wanted the blackbirds to notice something. He said the ribbon was for the charity walk, and Nell said that was fine, but they both knew it was for the letters. Mum had stitched the initials into the corner of a hankie years ago, and Owen had kept it folded in his wallet ever since.

Nell caught the first monarch of the Tuesday morning, a worn female with a torn hindwing. She held it by the edges of its wings, as the leaflet instructed, and felt the small weight of it settle on her knuckle. The tag bore a string of numbers she would post to a university in a country she had never visited.

She let it go over the wall. It rose past the gate, turned once above the orange bow as if checking the knot was straight, and then it was gone over the beeches towards the quarry.