Black ink line drawing of a stylised butterfly with flowing wings and curled swirling antennae on a plain white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black line butterfly design

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a stylised butterfly or insect-like figure drawn in thick black lines on a white background. Two tall, curved wing shapes rise from a body that tapers into a looping tail, and the antennae end in small spirals. The linework is bold and continuous with no shading, and the design is shown in black only.

Butterfly Wing Antennae Swirl Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mason's boy kept the last lamp burning in Carrow Keep because nobody else would climb the north stair after dark. Wind came through the arrow slits with a sound like someone counting coins, and the owls had long ago taken the chapel roof. Each evening he carried a tin of tallow up the hundred and twelve steps and set it on the sill beneath the broken window, and each evening the moths came.

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They were no common moths. Their wings rose taller than a man's hand and curved back like sickles, and their bodies narrowed into tails that looped over themselves like ferns uncurling in spring. Their feelers ended in small tight coils. The old steward said they were the castle's broken promises come home, and that the lamp was the only thing keeping them from settling on the living.

Sorrel, the mason's daughter, did not believe a word of it. One winter she climbed the stair with bread and a flask and found her brother asleep against the wall. A pale wing brushed the glass and went still. She picked it up and saw, in the veins, a name she knew: her own, written in a hand that was not hers. So she did what no one had thought to do. She lifted the lamp off the sill and carried it down into the courtyard.

The moths followed her out past the gate, over the frozen moat, and up into the black hills, until the last of them was a scratch of light against the stars. Her brother woke in the dark and called for her. She called back. Morning came grey and ordinary, and the sill stood empty, the tin of tallow cold beside it.