Pencil drawing of a tattoo design with two butterflies, swirling scrolls and outlined stars arranged in a vertical column.

Butterflies, swirls and stars design

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil sketch on paper of a vertical tattoo design featuring two butterflies with shaded, patterned wings. Fine swirling scrolls and outlined stars surround the butterflies, with the motifs spaced down a tall, narrow composition. The work uses grey graphite shading and soft highlights, with no colour.

Butterfly Swirl Star Scroll Vine

Find an artist for this

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

You have been told three times this week to keep your pencil off the order sheets, yet the lead still finds its way into the margins while the chip pan spits. Tonight the Starlight Pier is shut and the arcade lamps are dimmed to a single amber row. Gerald, who has painted the carousel panels since before you were born, props his ladder against the big menu board and says nothing when he finds you there with your sleeves rolled and a rag tucked in your back pocket.

Keep reading

You are drawing without thinking: a curl that rises like smoke off a cigarette, then a second curl that tangles with the first. Two butterflies arrive on the board, one with spotted wings, one smaller and tilted as if it has just been startled off a rail. Between them you scatter stars, five-pointed and slightly lopsided, the way the tin ones looked when your mother pinned them above the mantel in Hastings.

Gerald comes back with a flask of stewed tea and stops at the foot of the ladder. He looks at the drawing for a long time. The sea takes a painter's work faster than rain, he says, so draw what you want to keep. Then he hands you the soft grey pencil he uses for the horses' hinges and goes back down to the carousel without another word.

By morning the board has been wiped for the Saturday specials, and the chip grease has begun to bloom across the corner. The butterflies are still there underneath, faint as breath on glass, and you can still find the place where the last swirl curls back on itself and stops.