Black and grey dotwork butterfly tattoo with detailed wings and antennae, placed centrally on the chest below the bust.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Monarch butterfly on the chest

Dotwork · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A large monarch butterfly is shown with its wings open, seen from above and centred on the chest. The wings are shaded with fine stippled dots and lighter grey tones, with darker outlines and veining picked out in black. The background is plain skin with a dark garment held up at the top of the frame.

Dotwork Realism Chest Butterfly Monarch butterfly Wing Antennae Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the kettle's not boiled and you'll hear this before the tea. Forty years back the Mary Ann lay off the Scilly rocks with her nets come up empty, and Jack Tregear sat on the foredeck mending a warp, swearing at the knots the way men do when the sea has been unkind all week. Then something settled on the rail beside his hand. A monarch, its orange gone to dirty brown with salt, wings held open like it was sunning itself on a chapel step.

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Jack didn't move. Nobody on that boat had seen a butterfly further out than the Lizard, and the old men said a thing like that was either luck or a warning, depending on what you'd done to deserve it. The creature stayed three days. It rode the rigging through a dead calm, and when the gulls came down to look at it, it simply opened and closed its wings, dark veins drawn fine as pencil and the speckled grey soft as ash on a hearth.

On the fourth morning the wind came back from the south-west and the butterfly lifted off the rail without any fuss. They shot the nets that same hour, and the Mary Ann came home so low in the water that the harbour master walked down the quay to count her. Nobody on that crew ever said the word miracle in front of Jack. He just nodded at the western sky and went home for his dinner.

He kept the warp he'd been mending, though, and tied the last knot in it the way the butterfly had folded its wings, two loops pressed flat together. Thirty years on they buried him in his good jumper, and his granddaughter found that knot still holding in the cupboard by the back door. She wore it on a cord round her neck for the rest of her life, and said it was the only thing he ever gave her that wasn't worth a penny.