Realistic orange and black butterfly tattoo with a cast shadow on the upper chest, below the collarbone.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Orange butterfly with shadow on chest

Realism · Chest · Colour · Photo

A photograph of a butterfly tattoo on the upper chest, close to the collarbone, with a grey top strap visible below. The butterfly has orange wings with black edging and white spots, and its wings are shaded to look raised off the skin with a dark shadow beneath. The background is a soft, warm-toned blur.

Realism Chest Butterfly Shadow Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The orange butterfly came in through the scullery window the week the last of the summer boarders went home, and it settled on the rim of the copper pan as if it had paid for the room. Mrs Trewin shooed it with a tea towel. It would not go. It opened and closed its wings on the warm brass until she gave up and left the back door ajar.

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Her son Jory, who was nine and had never been further than Penzance, decided it belonged to the sea. Each evening it flew over the harbour wall and came home before the lamps were lit. The boarders who sat on the front step noticed something odd. When the sun sank low, the butterfly threw a shadow onto the whitewashed wall of the terrace, a shadow far larger than itself and dark as a doorway, and it always ran a little ahead of the wings, as though it went first to check the way was safe.

One October the butterfly did not come back. Jory sat on the step with a saucer of sugar water until the water dried. Mrs Trewin said the wind had taken it. Old Mr Hosken, who had lodged there for forty years, said nothing, but he walked out to the wall at dusk and stood looking at the place where the shadow used to fall. The shadow was still there, faint and brown, pressed into the lime like a thumbprint in wet clay.

Jory kept the saucer filled after that. Some mornings the sugar was gone, and on those mornings there was a faint orange smudge beside the shadow, as though a wing had brushed the wall on its way past, and the shadow itself looked a shade darker than the night before.