Realistic colour tattoo of a peacock butterfly with red, orange and black wings with eyespots, on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peacock butterfly on a shoulder blade

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

A realistic tattoo of a peacock butterfly with its wings spread at an angle, showing red and orange panels, dark brown edges and blue-and-black eyespots. Shading gives the wings a three-dimensional, lifelike look, with soft fur-like texture on the body. The butterfly sits on smooth skin across the upper back, with a soft shadow beneath it.

Realism Back Butterfly Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gale had blown the butterfly out past the Buchan ground, and it was sitting on the wheelhouse rail when we hauled the first net on the third morning, wings open as if it were sunning itself on a garden wall. Cook swore it was dead until it lifted its wings and the eyespots caught the grey light, blue and black with a ring of gold, and the whole deck went quiet.

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Skipper Murdo Leask wanted it off the boat before it jinxed us, and I was the one who had to coax it onto my glove with a scrap of herring. It weighed nothing. Its furred body was warm from the engine vent, and when I carried it aft the wind came round and the wings flexed like a fan being shut, red panels showing, dark edges crisp as cut card.

We made no more catch that week than we would have made in fog. Every time the nets came up with a mess of haddock, somebody checked the rail first. On the Friday, with Peterhead's lights smudged on the horizon, the butterfly rose off my knuckle and circled the mast twice, as if counting the crew.

It went over the harbour wall ahead of us, low above the gulls and the fish boxes, and I lost it against the orange of the sodium lamps. Murdo reckons it went for the buddleia behind the allotments, where it could feed before the cold came. I didn't argue. I kept the herring scrap in my pocket all winter, just in case.