Pink butterfly tattoo with black and white dotted edges and a soft grey shadow, sitting on the upper back beside the shoulder blade.

Pink butterfly with shadow on a shoulder blade

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A realistic pink butterfly with black wings edged in white dots is shown from a slight angle, seen from behind. Smooth shading gives the wings and body depth, and a dark grey shadow beneath the butterfly makes it appear to hover above the skin. The subject is a woman with her hair in a bun, wearing a black strapless top, and only the back of her head is visible.

Realism Back Butterfly Shadow Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The butterfly came aboard at Freetown, riding the bowsprit lines like a loose thread, and by the third week out of Cape Town the whole crew had stopped pretending it was an ordinary insect. Ruth Adeyemi, who ran the galley on the *Mary Dunmore* and had counted every tin of pilchards between here and the Falklands, kept a saucer of sugared water on the rail for it. Its wings were the pink of rhubarb jam, edged in black and freckled with white, and when it opened them in the noon sun it cast a shadow on the planking that was darker and softer than any shadow had a right to be.

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Nobody liked to mention that. The second mate, Tully, a Glaswegian with twenty years of these waters behind him, said a shadow that wanders off from its owner is a bad omen, and went below without his tea. Ruth noticed only that the shadow never wandered. When the butterfly moved, the shadow stayed put, lying over the hatch, over the coiled halyards, over the patch of deck where the bosun had once dropped a bucket of tar, and it never once lifted to follow the thing that made it.

On the fortieth day, in a gale south of the Roaring Forties, the butterfly beat itself flat against the galley porthole. Ruth caught it in her palm, cold and papery, and carried it up the ladder into the wind. She had meant only to let it go. Instead she felt it lift off her hand and drift out over the grey water, and below on the deck the dark shape of its shadow rose too, slowly, peeling from the boards like wet paint, and kept pace with it across the waves.

Tully found her there at dawn, the deck bare of anything dark. "Well," he said, looking at the empty rail. "Somebody's left something behind." He pointed. On the planks by the hatch, faint as breath, lay a single pale outline of wings, waiting for the sun to fill it in.