Colour tattoo of a monarch butterfly with orange wings and black outlines on the upper arm above the elbow.

Monarch butterfly on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A monarch butterfly is tattooed with its wings spread open, seen from above with the head at the top and the antennae curving outwards. The wings use orange and amber tones with black veins and borders, and the body is solid black. The tattoo sits on the upper arm above the elbow, with a floral patterned skirt and grey top visible in the background.

Upper arm Butterfly Monarch butterfly Wing Antennae

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The monarchs came over the bay every September, when the wind backed round to the south and the gulls went quiet on the harbour wall. Nobody in Porthlow knew where they came from. Old Jenefer Pascoe said they had flown out of the sunset carrying the names of the men lost on the Gannet, and that they went back in April to fetch the next ones. She said it while she mended nets, and she never once looked up.

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Tom Harrow was nine that autumn and did not believe her. He sat on the rope store roof with a jam jar and tried to catch one. Each time he got close, the butterfly lifted off the slate and settled on the mast of his father's boat, the Mary Ellen, moored below. Its wings opened and closed, orange as a lamp behind glass, with black lines drawn tight along the edges. His father shouted from the quay that the boat was not a flower bed.

On the last evening of the month a fog came in thick enough to hide the breakwater. Tom heard the hull knocking against the pilings and went down alone with the jar. Twenty butterflies sat in the rigging with their wings folded upright like little sails. When he reached up, they rose together and drifted past the harbour mouth towards the fog and the open water, and he stood there until the cold got into his shoes.

His father found him at dawn asleep in the bow. In April, when the first warm wind came up from the south, the Mary Ellen's sail carried one orange smudge where a wing had brushed the canvas. Jenefer said nothing about it. She only fetched her knitting and asked whether the boy had eaten.