Colour tattoo of a monarch butterfly with a semicolon forming its body, shown in bold black outlines and orange wings on freckled skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Monarch butterfly with semicolon on skin

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A monarch butterfly with orange and black wings is tattooed on skin, with two solid black semicolon marks forming its body. The wings have bold black outlines, orange panels with yellow and red gradients, and small white dots along the black edges. The design sits centrally on a close crop of freckled skin with soft natural light.

Traditional Other Butterfly Monarch butterfly Semicolon Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Don't look at the lock like that, love, it's only water wanting to be somewhere else, same as the rest of us. Sit on the coping and I'll tell you about Ada Pirrie and the butterfly that wouldn't leave her boat. This was the autumn her husband Joe went down to the docks at Gloucester for work and stopped writing. Ada kept the narrowboat Tern going on her own, working the locks from Stourport to Worcester, and every night she wrote him a letter in the back of her lock ledger, then tore it out and put it in a biscuit tin.

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The monarch came aboard in September, clinging to the mooring rope like a scrap of old stained glass. Nobody on the cut had ever seen one that far north, and the men at the wharf said it had hitched a ride in a crate of grain off some ship, which is the sort of thing men say when they've got no answer. Ada didn't argue. She put it in a jam jar with a sprig of nettle, let it go at the top lock, and it came back the next morning, settled on the page where she'd been writing. She'd ended her last letter with a semicolon, not a full stop. When I asked her why, she said a full stop was a door shut in someone's face, and a semicolon just meant the sentence was still going and the other half was on its way.

Joe's reply came in April, one line on the back of a shipping receipt: Still here; still coming. Ada read it at the lock while the water rose and the gates groaned open. Then she pressed the paper flat in the ledger, and when she looked up, the monarch had lifted off the page and was going over the towpath towards the river, a small bright thing against all that grey water. That's the whole story, love. Mind your step on the way out.