Orange monarch-style butterfly tattoo with black outlines and a semicolon for its body, above the words Stay Strong and Carry On, on the side of the body.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Monarch butterfly semicolon with Stay Strong

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A butterfly with orange wings outlined in bold black, with wing veins drawn in black, and a black semicolon forming its body with two thin antennae above. Beneath it, black script reads Stay Strong and Carry On, with a small semicolon between the lines. The bold outlines and flat orange fill are shown against pale skin with a soft, plain background.

Other Butterfly Monarch butterfly Semicolon Antennae Stay strong Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, love, you'll want the whole of it before the lift decides to come back. Harcourt House had nine floors of washing lines and one lift that only moved when it felt like it. On the seventh floor lived a widow called Ada Penhale, who kept a jam jar of pennies on the sill and a monarch butterfly she'd scooped out of the bin shed that summer, wings gummed with sugar water and nothing else to show for its trouble.

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She dried it on a tea towel and named it Mr Dunmore, after the man on the fifth who never returned her hedge clippers. Every evening she held out a spoon of sweet water, and every evening the butterfly folded its wings shut and looked at her as if she owed it an apology.

Then Kieran from the fourth floor, nine years old and forever trailing a football, came up the stairs two at a time, shouting that his mum was stuck in the lift. Ada grabbed her cardigan, told him to carry the spoon, and they climbed to the roof together with Mr Dunmore cupped in her palm. The wind came off the car park smelling of diesel and rain, and the boy said the butterfly was going to die. Ada said it was resting, which is what Frank used to say about himself on Sunday mornings.

They opened her hand. The wings stayed shut, then opened, orange as the sodium lamps below, and the thing lifted over the railings and was gone. Kieran asked about the little curly mark Frank used to put at the end of his letters, the one she kept folded in her purse. A semicolon, she said, which is a full stop that's still listening. Then somewhere far below us the lift gave a ding, and the boy ran for it.