Black and grey realistic butterfly tattoo with dotted wing borders on the upper back, below the nape of the neck.

Monarch butterfly on upper back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of the upper back and nape of a person, showing a butterfly tattoo with open wings in a monarch-style pattern. The wings have dotted borders, fine veining and soft grey shading, with a segmented body and thin antennae. The tattoo sits centrally on a plain background of skin, with blurred paper posters visible behind.

Realism Back Butterfly Wing Insect

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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

Stop wriggling, Danny, and keep your hands flat on your knees, because the butterfly doesn't care how cold you are. It had come up eleven floors on the wind, which is how the wind likes to travel, and it had landed on the washing line as if it had paid the rent.

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Your grandad used to say the monarchs that visit Lark House are the great-great-grandchildren of ones that left Canada in spring. Not one of them has ever seen the mountains in Mexico, yet every autumn they fly there anyway, thousands of miles, leaning on the sun like a stick. They don't know the way. They carry it somehow, folded up in the wings like a map nobody taught them to read.

Last October the lift broke for a month, so Mrs Okafor and I carried our milkweed up the stairwell in buckets, one landing at a time, sloshing and swearing all the way. We set it on the fourteenth-floor balcony where the wind comes straight off the estuary. Then the butterfly went and sat on the railing, opening and closing its wings, opening and closing, as if it were counting something we couldn't see.

You want to keep it. I know. But look at the dots along its edges, like someone pricked a pattern through paper to show the route. When it lifted, the whole block went quiet, and it climbed past the aerial and over the ring road and the gasworks until the low sun caught it and it was gone. Wave at it now. You don't keep a thing like that. You only get to have seen it leave.