Small colour tattoo of an orange and black monarch butterfly with spread wings on the middle finger of a hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Monarch butterfly on a finger

Hand · Colour · Photo

A small monarch butterfly with spread wings is tattooed across the middle finger of a hand, photographed against a pale background. The black outlines and wing veins are crisp, and the orange wing panels are filled with flat, even colour. The butterfly sits centrally on the finger with the knuckle creases and the neighbouring fingers visible around it.

Hand Butterfly Monarch butterfly Wing

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, it's glazed over. There, sit by the range where the heat still lives. Now, the orange ones you find clinging to the ash trees in January are not dead things, whatever your mother says. They are the ones who did not go south with the others, and they sit in the dark of the old barn until the sun turns round and the milkweed wakes.

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Old Ada Pryce kept a biscuit tin of them on the kitchen windowsill, wings pressed flat between sheets of wax paper, each one a promise she had been asked to keep. Her brother Tom had gone out to the Argentine on a steamer in 1911 and written twice. The second letter came in a envelope that smelt of tar, and the paper was spotted with something that might have been ink or might have been rain. She never answered it. She told the winter it was because she did not know where a reply would find him.

The frost held until March that year, hard enough to split the water trough. Then one grey morning a monarch came up off the orchard and settled on the sill, wings opening and shutting like a slow hinge. Ada stood there in her apron a long while. Then she took a pencil stub from the drawer, wrote her answer on a scrap of wax paper no bigger than a stamp, and tucked it under the wing before the creature could think better of it.

She opened the casement and let it go over the frozen ploughland, orange against all that grey. I have never known where it landed. That is the trouble with letters, and the mercy of them too.