Colour tattoo of a monarch butterfly with a trailing stem and loose watercolour-style splashes across the side of a torso, sitting on the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Monarch butterfly and stem on ribs

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A monarch butterfly with orange, red and yellow wings is drawn in loose black linework, with a stem running down from it. A faded grey-brown shape sits lower on the stem, and soft watercolour-like washes and ink splatters surround the wings. The tattoo covers the side of the ribs against a plain light background.

Ribs Butterfly Monarch butterfly Flower Stem Ink splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The monarch came over the back wall of the allotments on the last warm Thursday of September, and Margaret Tully stopped with the fork in the soil to watch it go. Nobody on Carr Lane grew milkweed. Her late husband had called the plot a shed with ambitions, and he had been right about most things except the cosmos, which came up every year wherever it liked.

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Her son arrived at eleven with a flatbed van and a list. The plot was to be cleared before the sale on Saturday, he said, and the council wanted it turned over to bare earth by the weekend. He pulled at a dead bean frame and it came away in his hands like paper. 'Mum, you can't keep the stalks,' he said. 'They're just sticks now.'

She didn't argue. She went to the bottom bed where the old Michaelmas daisies had gone to seed, the heads blown into grey-brown fluff on wire stems, and she stood there with her hands in her coat pockets. The monarch came back. It settled on the highest stalk and opened its wings slowly, orange over black, the colour of a lamp seen through rain, then folded them shut again as if someone had asked it a question and it was thinking the answer over.

Dev watched her for a while and then went to the van for a second cup of tea. When he came back the stalk was still standing and the butterfly had gone over the railway embankment toward the sidings. She did not tell him she had left the bed alone. On Saturday the buyers would find a row of bare sticks and one bent seedhead, and they would wonder why anybody had bothered.