Black ink flash design of three butterflies, hanging feathers and dotted chains in a dotwork style, shown without any body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterflies and feathers dotwork design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a symmetrical arrangement of butterflies with wings patterned in fine stippling, with an ornate central motif and feathers hanging from a looping chain of dots. The linework is fine and the shading is built from dense dots and short strokes. It is drawn in black ink on a pale background, with the elements spread across a wide, roughly diamond-shaped composition.

Dotwork Butterfly Feather Ornament Symmetry

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had ruled the lines for the Abbot's psalter so often that his fingers knew the pricked guide-holes in the vellum before his eyes did. This page was to be a mirror. Whatever the left side held, the right must answer it dot for dot, or the Abbot would hold it to the window, find the seam, and send me back to the cellarer's ledgers for another winter.

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The butterflies were the difficulty. Brother Ysolde at Kilcreggan had painted wings that looked like stained glass, but I had only iron-gall ink and a goose quill cut square. I stippled each wing with the point, hundreds of small dark breaths, so that the colour seemed to pale toward the edge the way the sky does before dusk. Feathers hung from the dotted chain below them, three to a side, each barb drawn in a single stroke that I had to lift before the ink could blot.

On the ninth night the candle guttered and I worked by the light from the cloister door. When I came back at matins the left-hand butterfly had moved. Its wings were held half open, as if it had only just settled, and the dots beneath it had shifted by the width of one nib. I told myself the damp had lifted the ink. I measured the chain with a thread and found it exact to the old mark, the seam hidden, the right wing answering the left as it had always been meant to.

Brother Walter says it was a moth drawn to the lamp. I have stopped arguing. The Abbot has accepted the page and hung it in the chapter house where the light is poor, and each morning I pass beneath it and look first at the left wing, because it is the one that moved.