Three orange monarch butterflies with black outlines and shading tattooed on the side of a person's ribs, with their shirt lifted.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three monarch butterflies on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Colour · Photo

Three monarch butterflies are tattooed on the side of the ribcage, decreasing in size from the largest at the top to the smallest at the lower right. The wings have bold black outlines, orange fills with darker shading, and white spots along the edges. The photo is taken indoors in a domestic room, with a chair, a wooden table and a wall socket visible behind the skin.

Realism Ribs Butterfly Monarch butterfly Wing Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The monarchs came over the water in the last week of September, when the wind turned round to the south and the ferry stopped running on Tuesdays. My grandfather said they had no business crossing at all, a thing so light should have blown into the sea and stayed there. He kept a tally on the back of the chandlery door, pencil strokes in fives, and every October he added a bar for each year he had counted them.

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The summer I was nine, I found three of them stuck to the salt-crusted rail of the jetty, wings folded like old letters. I carried them home in a biscuit tin lined with my mother's handkerchief. Grandfather looked at them a long time and then said they were the stragglers, the ones who lose the others in the crowd and have to make their own way. He cut a fresh bar on the door for them, a short one, and said nothing more about it.

Years later, when he had moved into the cottage for good and the chandlery had a new sign, I took the tin down from the loft. The handkerchief had gone the colour of weak tea. Under it were the three wings, still orange where the light had never reached, black veins like the lead in a window. I pressed them flat under the almanac and wrote the date beside them, then the wind directions he used to say they flew on: south-west, then west, then out past the reef where nobody could follow.

The door is still in the shop. Last autumn I stood in front of the tally with a pencil and added one more bar, a small one, for the year I finally left the island and the monarchs kept arriving without me. The wind had gone round to the south again. I could hear the ferry not running.