Colour tattoo of a monarch butterfly with open wings on the inner forearm, shaded to look three-dimensional against a dark background.

Monarch butterfly on an inner forearm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A monarch butterfly with wings spread wide, shown from above with its body in the centre. The wings use orange and yellow with black veins and borders, white spots along the edges, and soft shading that gives the wings depth. The tattoo sits on a pale forearm against a dark background, with the composition centred on the butterfly.

Realism Forearm Butterfly Monarch butterfly Wing Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The band had started the foxtrot again when the butterfly came in off the pier, riding the draught through the open doors as if it had paid for a ticket. Nobody else noticed. I was minding the cloakroom that night because Mrs Pulley had gone home with her hip, and I had a row of wet mackintoshes steaming on their hooks and brass tags in both hands.

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Teddy Vance had asked me to dance three times that season and I had said no three times, because a girl who checks coats for a living does not go dancing with the lads from the lifeboat crew. Still, I watched him cross the floor in his good grey suit, and I watched the butterfly settle on the rim of a glass he'd left by the hatch. Its wings opened and closed slowly, orange as marmalade, the black borders sharp as ink, the white spots scattered along the edges like salt on a biscuit.

It walked along the counter as if it knew the way. I held out a finger and it climbed onto my knuckle, light as a folded ticket. Teddy stopped beside me, a little out of breath, and said nothing at all, which for Teddy was a speech. "It's come a long way," he said eventually, "for a dance."

We took it out onto the pier steps together, the music thinning behind us. I lifted my hand into the salt wind and the monarch rose, wobbling, then steadied and went out over the black water towards the lighthouse. Teddy asked me then, properly, and I said yes before he could finish the question.