Colour tattoo of a monarch butterfly with green, yellow-green, pink and orange wings and black outlines, on the upper arm of a person wearing a dark top.

Multicoloured monarch butterfly on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A monarch butterfly is shown in side view with its wings spread, drawn with bold black outlines and white dot details along the wing edges. Each wing is filled with flat, saturated colour in green, yellow-green, pink and orange, with lighter highlights along the veins. The butterfly sits on the upper arm against a plain skin background, with parts of other tattoos visible at the edges of the frame.

Neo-trad Upper arm Butterfly Monarch butterfly Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dye works had been shut since the mill fire, but Nell still went down to the yard before light, because the vats did not know they were dead. Four of them stood under the broken skylight, rimmed with crust the colour of old ink, each one chalked with her father's hand: madder, weld, verdigris, cochineal. Rain came through the holes in the roof and pooled in the lids. She bailed it out with an enamel jug and tipped it into the gutter, the way he had taught her, as if water were something that could be spoiled.

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The council wanted the chimney down by spring. Ashby from the planning office had shown her the survey: a crack running up the brick like a split vein, and a roost of something he called 'a nuisance of insects' hanging from the flue. She knew what they were. Every September the monarchs came over the moor in ragged thousands, stopping in the works because the warm brick held them through the night. Her father used to say they were the only customers who never paid and never complained.

That autumn she took the last bolt of cotton, a plain length as long as her arm, and dipped it in each vat in turn. Madder took the edge orange, weld turned the middle to lemon, verdigris drew a green sea across the top, and cochineal bled pink into the seam where the others would not sit still. She hung it on the line in the rain, sodden and absurd, and went in for her tea without looking at it again.

In the morning the yard was full of wings. One monarch had settled on the cloth, black veins stitched with white dots, and it stayed there while the rain eased off the roof. Ashby's men came up the lane at nine with their hard hats and clipboards. She heard them stop at the gate, heard one of them laugh, and then heard nothing at all about the chimney, which stood on the hill that winter exactly as it had always done.