Realistic colour tattoo of a monarch butterfly with open wings on the top of a foot, with a quarter coin resting beside the toes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Monarch butterfly on the top of a foot

Realism · Other · Colour · Photo

A realistic monarch butterfly with open wings sits on the top of a foot, its orange panels outlined in black with fine vein detail. Soft shading gives the wings a raised, three-dimensional look and a dark shadow falls beneath the body. The tattoo is set against pale skin, with a silver coin and red painted toenails visible in the frame.

Realism Other Butterfly Monarch butterfly Wing Foot

Find an artist for this

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

Don't you go reaching for that windfall yet, Tom, I'm not finished. Sit on the wall where the sun's still warm, and mind the wasps in the Bramleys. Your grandad had this story from a man who picked pears in Kent before the war, and he swore every word was true.

Keep reading

There was a summer when the apples came down early and nobody bothered to gather them. Late August, the grass gone gold, and a monarch came drifting over the hedge like a loose page from a prayer book. Orange panels, black lines fine as hair, every vein drawn in. It settled on an old boot left by the gate, wings open flat as if it wanted the sun on both sides at once. The shadow it threw on the earth was darker than the butterfly itself.

Ada, the farmer's girl, saw it and set a silver coin on the step beside the boot, the way you'd tip a stranger for a kindness. Folk said the monarchs carried our summers south on their backs, all the way to a mountain forest in Mexico where they hang like dead leaves until spring. Ada didn't believe a word. She only wanted to see whether the coin would weigh it down. It didn't. The butterfly lifted, the coin stayed put, and she went in to her tea.

Years later her son crossed the sea to see those mountains, and he sent back a postcard with one orange wing pressed flat inside it. Ask me what it means and I'll only say the apples fell, and the butterfly never needed them. So leave the windfalls, lad. Something always comes to collect what the orchard can't keep.