Back of a woman with a realistic pink butterfly tattoo, black outlined with white dots and a dark grey shadow beneath it, on her left shoulder blade.

Pink butterfly with cast shadow on a shoulder blade

Realism · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A photograph of a woman's upper back, seen from behind with her hair tied up, showing a large pink butterfly with black edges and white dot detailing. The butterfly is rendered with soft shading and a dark grey drop shadow offset below it, which gives a three-dimensional, lifted effect. The pink, black and grey sit against plain skin and a pale background, with a black strapless top at the lower edge of the frame.

Realism Shoulder Back Butterfly Shadow Wing Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tom had been gone three days when the butterfly came in off the water and settled on the lee wall of the net shed. Nobody on Skerrow had seen a red one that far north before. Ma said it was a sign, then said it was only the wind, then went back to scrubbing the flagstones as if neither answer needed deciding.

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I took a jam jar and our father's tide clock down to the harbour, because Tom always said the lost are only ever a shadow behind the living. The butterfly lifted when I came near. Its wings were the pink of sea thrift in June, edged in black lace with white pinpricks, and when it turned in the sun it threw a shadow onto the stones a good hand's width below itself, soft and dark as ink spreading through water. It looked as if the creature hung a little above the world, and the world had to catch up.

Old Rab laughed when I told him. He said a shadow that falls the wrong way is a debt owed, and the debt was Tom's to pay, not mine. So I climbed the cliff path to the cairn where Tom had left his oar, set the jar on the stones and lifted the lid. The butterfly went out over the drop, and the shadow stayed behind, pressed flat to the grey rock like a hand against glass.

The boat came round the point at first light, low in the water, with Tom at the tiller and his cap in his teeth. The shadow was still on the cairn when we walked past it. Nobody on Skerrow has tried to scrub it off.