Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Monarch butterfly on a shoulder

Realism · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A monarch butterfly with open wings sits on the upper shoulder of a person, with black-and-white wing edging, orange panels and fine veins shown in detailed shading. A soft grey shadow beneath the wings makes the butterfly appear to lift off the skin. The photo is taken close up against a plain skin tone and a dark top, with a brick wall in the background.

Realism Shoulder Butterfly Monarch butterfly Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the year the wool mill closed, a monarch butterfly came down out of the hedgerow and settled on the sleeve of Ada Pell, who was sweeping the chapel step. She brushed at it with the broom. It did not go. It sat there with its wings spread, as if someone had pinned it on who knew exactly how.

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Her grandmother used to say that a butterfly which settles on a living person is carrying a debt from the dead, and it will fly only when the debt is paid. So Ada went round the village asking what was owed. The baker said bread. The vicar said prayers. The schoolmaster, who had taught them all their letters forty years before, said nothing at all. He only looked at the butterfly a long while and asked her to come to the old class reunion in the schoolroom that Saturday, where the desks were still carved with initials.

At the reunion they read the register aloud, name by name. When they came to Tom Harrow, who had gone to sea and never written, the butterfly lifted off Ada's sleeve and flew straight to the window. Its shadow stayed behind on the floorboards, long and grey, in the shape a standing man would have made. Nobody spoke. The schoolmaster opened the window wider, and the shadow lay where it was and would not be swept.

Ada swept it up in the morning anyway, and it came away like soot. She never saw the butterfly again, but every autumn a monarch crossed the churchyard wall at Thorncombe, and she left the gate open for it.