Black and white butterfly flash design with open wings, bold solid outlines and spotted wing borders, with no placement shown.

Monarch butterfly design, wings open

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical butterfly drawn in solid black outline on a white background, with wings spread wide and long thin antennae. The wing cells are open white panels framed by heavy black veins, and the borders are filled with rows of small white spots. The image is flat and graphic, with no shading or colour.

Botanical Butterfly Monarch butterfly Wing Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Your mother never told you about the summer the orange one landed on the washing line, did she? Sit still, Dennis, and mind the kettle. Mrs Pargeter had pegged out her husband's shirts that Tuesday, and the wind off the Avon had got into the sheets, and there it was on the third peg, clinging to a cuff like a stamp somebody had licked and forgotten.

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It was black where it ought to be black, all ribbed and dark like the leading in a church window, and the cells between the veins were open and white, as if the light had been let straight through. Round the edge ran a row of small white spots, neat as stitches. Alan Trim from the post office came up the lane on his bicycle and swore it had crossed the sea in the rigging of the Bristol boat, hidden in a coil of rope. Nobody believed him, but nobody could say he was wrong either, and by teatime half the street had come to look at it.

They tried to shoo it off with a broom and it wouldn't go. Mrs Pargeter put a saucer of sugar water on the step and sat beside it with her knitting, and she said a thing like that would only fly when it was ready, the way you can't hurry a letter that's still in somebody's head. On the Thursday the wind swung round to the south-west. The butterfly lifted off the cuff, opened and closed twice like a book being read, and went over the roofs towards the sea.

Mrs Pargeter said it was headed for a place where the milkweed grew in long orange rows and the sun never once asked anybody to hurry. Then she took in the shirts, and every one of them had a faint dusting of gold on the collar where it had been.