Colour tattoo of a monarch butterfly and a sunflower with script reading forget me not across the top of a foot, in a botanical style.

Monarch butterfly and sunflower on a foot

Botanical · Other · Colour · Photo

A monarch butterfly rests above a large sunflower with a dark brown centre and yellow petals, with the words forget me not written in black script across the foot. The butterfly and flower use soft shading and blended colour in orange, yellow and brown, while the lettering is in solid black linework. The subject fills the frame on a light grey towel, with the toes visible at the bottom and red nail polish on each toe.

Botanical Lettering Other Monarch butterfly Butterfly Sunflower Script Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Pryce planted the sunflowers along the top of the allotment because the pit wall was too cracked for anything else to hold. By the first week of August they stood taller than the chapel gate, their heads turned east like a row of men waiting for the cage. Her father had said they would keep the coal dust off the beans, which was nonsense, but she liked to think of them standing guard.

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Dan Rhys came up the lane one afternoon with his shirt open and a complaint about the heat. He stopped at the fence when he saw the butterfly. It was a monarch, orange as a lamp, working slowly across the biggest head where the seeds packed tight like a brown pincushion. "Shoo it off before it spoils your seed," he said. Ada shook her head. "It came up from somewhere warmer than this valley. It'll go back the same way when the frost comes, and the seed will go to the finches anyway."

He sat on the water butt and drank from his flask while the butterfly opened and closed its wings on the petals. Ada took an envelope from her apron pocket. It had come with the seed packet from her cousin in Bristol, who had written on the back in pencil: forget me not. Then she had crossed out forget and written remember, and crossed that out too. Ada had never decided which one she meant.

In October the monarch left on the west wind, and the sunflowers hung their heads over the fence like tired men at the end of a shift. Ada cut the largest head, wrapped it in an old copy of the Ferndale Gazette, and hung it from a nail in the shed. Next spring she would plant it along the wall again, and she would have something to keep.