Realistic orange and black monarch butterfly tattoo on the back of a person's neck, with lilac hair pinned up in a bun.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Monarch butterfly on the back of the neck

Realism · Neck · Colour · Photo

The photograph shows the back of a person's neck and upper back, with lilac hair pinned up in a bun. A shaded monarch butterfly with open wings sits centrally on the neck, with dark linework defining the wing veins and edges. Orange, black and white tones give the design a colour finish against smooth skin, and the framing keeps the face out of shot.

Realism Neck Butterfly Monarch butterfly Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The milkweed had come up in the wrong corner of the allotment again, between the leeks and the rhubarb, where Dorothy Ashdown had sworn she would not let anything grow that she hadn't planted herself. Her neighbour Ruth had scattered the seed in March from a paper packet with an orange butterfly printed on the front, and now the stalks stood taller than the bean canes, weeping white milk at the snapped tips.

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"They're for the caterpillars," Ruth said, kneeling in the mud with a trowel. "Nothing else will eat them. Do you know where they go in winter?" Dorothy did not, and said so. Ruth told her about the fir forests high in the mountains of central Mexico, where millions of them hang from the branches in clusters like dead leaves, waiting out the cold, and how the ones that leave in autumn are never the ones that come back in spring. "They never make the trip twice," Ruth said. "Their children do the rest."

That evening Dorothy found a striped caterpillar on the underside of a stalk, fat as a thumb, and carried it indoors in a shoebox lined with kitchen roll. She fed it fresh leaves for nine days and watched it hang itself into a jade case flecked with gold. On the tenth morning the case had gone clear, and the wings inside were the colour of marmalade held up to a window.

She opened the kitchen window and waited. The butterfly sat on the sill for a long time, opening and closing its wings as if testing a hinge, then lifted over the rhubarb and climbed past the chimneys towards the south. Dorothy kept her eyes on it until it was only a flicker and then nothing at all, and she stood there with the empty shoebox in her hands, thinking about a forest she would never see.