Black line drawing of a tattoo flash design with two butterflies, lily flowers, swirling stems and dots, suited to a sleeve or back piece.

Butterflies and lilies flash design

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

This line drawing shows two butterflies, three lily-style flowers, curling stems and scattered dots arranged in a vertical composition. The linework is clean and uniform with fine internal detail on the wings and petals, and there is no shading or fill. The image is black and white only, with open white space around the motif.

Fine line Botanical Butterfly Lily Flower Swirl Dot Stem

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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

The ink on the bulb manifest had run in the sea fog, so Nell Trewhella copied the lily names again by lamplight, the way her grandfather had taught her to copy anything the weather might take. Two painted ladies had come off the Roscoff boat that morning, tangled in a crate of Madonna lilies, one with a wing torn to a fringe. Nell pinned the sound one flat on blotting paper and spent an hour on the speckles alone, counting them under her glass as if the count mattered more than the flight.

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Harbourmaster Ivo Penhaligon came in dripping at noon and found her still at it. He wanted a drawing for the chandlery sign, something pretty enough to sell rope and lamp oil under. Nell said she had nothing pretty, only a butterfly and a crate of lilies, and he laughed and said that was pretty enough for anyone.

She did not give him the butterfly. She drew the stems instead, curling up the page like the coil of a mooring line, and set the lilies heavy at the base where the petals would catch the light. Then she came to the open paper above and did not know what to put there. Her hand went to the pot of white gouache and she dabbed rings, small and then larger, the way spray comes off the breakwater on a south-westerly.

Ivo looked at it a long while. "That's not a sign," he said. "That's the harbour on a bad day."

Nell blotted the last ring and said nothing. Outside, the fog lifted off the quay, and the torn butterfly, which she had forgotten on the sill, opened its wings once in the warmth and went out through the window.