Colour botanical tattoo of a monarch butterfly, pink lilies and monstera and palm leaves across the outer thigh and hip.

Monarch butterfly and tropical leaves on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A monarch butterfly sits at the centre of a cluster of pink flowers, palm fronds and a monstera leaf, with black dotted wing edges. The leaves and flower petals use soft shading and fine vein lines in muted greens, yellows and dusty pinks. The design wraps over the outer hip and thigh, with the butterfly positioned slightly above the middle of the cluster.

Botanical Thigh Butterfly Monarch butterfly Flower Lily Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Noor had the platform bench to herself at twenty to six, which is how she came to notice the butterfly. It had blown in through the open doors of the parcel office, a monarch gone dull under the sodium lamps, and it kept circling the hanging fern outside the ticket hall as if the fern owed it an explanation.

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Her uncle Tomas had run the florist's kiosk by the barrier for thirty-one years. He sold lilies wrapped in brown paper to men who had forgotten anniversaries, and he kept a monstera in a tin bucket that nobody had ever watered on purpose. He was in hospital with his hip, and the kiosk key hung on a loop of string in her coat pocket, along with a list in his square capitals: FEED THE FERN. DO NOT TOUCH THE MONSTERA, IT IS OLDER THAN YOU.

The 17:52 was cancelled. A guard announced it in two languages and then a third that nobody understood. The butterfly settled on the cold rail beside her, opened and closed its wings, and the black dots along the edges looked like someone had flicked ink from a pen. Noor thought about how far it had come, and how it would keep going south on a map nobody had drawn for it, and how all it needed from her was to stop being carried.

She unlocked the kiosk, watered the fern, and propped the side door wide. The butterfly lifted past the departure board, past the iron ribs of the roof, and over the pigeons, until the light caught its orange once and then it was gone. Tomas would ask about the lilies. She would tell him they had gone somewhere warmer.