Black and grey shaded butterfly tattoo on the upper arm, with bold black wing outlines and soft grey shading across the wing panels.

Shaded butterfly tattoo on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A butterfly with spread wings and antennae is shown from above, centred on the upper arm. The bold black outline has a dotted border along the wing edges, and soft grey shading fills the wing panels and the body. The tattoo is shown in black and grey against plain skin, with a striped top and framed pictures in the blurred background.

Realism Upper arm Butterfly Wing Insect Antennae

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wagon from Ellerby came in on a Tuesday, late, its load still ticking as it cooled, and you were sent to uncouple it because Dai Mort had gone home with his chest. Coal dust lay on everything in Saltersby like a second skin, on the chapel windows, the bread, the hymn books, so when you saw the butterfly on the buffer rail you took it at first for a scrap of paper somebody had dropped.

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It was a monarch, which you had only ever seen in your mother's seed catalogue, the orange gone to ash, the black veins holding firm and the dots along the edge still perfect. It had ridden three hundred miles of grime without tearing a wing. You put your palm under it. It walked onto your finger slow and certain, and you stood in the cold yard feeling the whole village tilt a little toward the sky.

Nobody believed you about where it came from. Mrs Pryce said it had come up out of the hedges along the cutting, and Wyn at the screens said the truck had been loaded at the Midlands sidings and nothing living travelled that far in a coal wagon. You put it in your father's old baccy tin with a folded square of wet moss, punched air holes in the lid with a nail from the lamp room, and carried it up the hill past the gates.

At the top, where the slag heap sloped down to the allotments, you opened the tin. The wings had dried, and when the wind came off the hills it lifted them once, black lace over grey, and then it was gone over the fence into a field of dandelions that had not been told the mine was shutting. You stood with the empty tin until the light went, and then you went down to tell your mother it had flown.