Realistic pink and black butterfly tattoo with a soft drop shadow on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink 3D butterfly on upper back

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A three-dimensional butterfly with pink and red wings edged in black sits on the upper back near the shoulder blade, with its body at the centre. Black and grey shading beneath the wings creates a soft drop shadow that makes the butterfly appear to float above the skin. The photograph is taken from behind and above, with the tattoo placed slightly off-centre in the frame.

Realism Back Butterfly Monarch butterfly Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The monarchs came in on a south-westerly the week my grandfather stopped speaking to the minister. Nobody on Ruadh had seen one before, and by Tuesday there were dozens of them hanging from the wire of the fank and the wet rail of the pier, pink as the inside of a mussel shell, edged in black like someone had gone over them with a fine pen. My grandmother said they had lost their way from America. My grandfather said they had been blown off course from a country with no sheep, which was why they were so thin in the wing.

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I was nine and allowed to go as far as the shop with a jam jar full of holes punched in the lid. I caught one on the sill of the post office window, where it had been opening and shutting itself in the sun. Mrs Ferguson watched me through the glass and did not stop me. Back at the house the thing sat on my knuckle like it had been paid to, and when the light came low across the kitchen floor, it threw a shadow behind it on the lino, dark and soft at the edges, as if it were lifting off the floor rather than my hand.

My grandfather came in from the net shed with salt in his eyebrows and looked at the jar for a long time. He did not say anything about the minister. He just tipped his head towards the door and said that a thing that is going to leave should be let go higher than the wall, or the wind will only bring it back.

So I carried it up the brae to the old dyke and opened the lid. It went up over the sheep and the gorse and the sea, and I watched until I could not tell it from the gulls. When I walked back down, the shadow was still on the slate step where my hand had been, a pink-grey smudge that would not wash off, and my grandfather stood over it with a bucket, saying nothing, and leaving it there.