Black ink drawing of a butterfly above an open hand, with dotwork shading on the wings, shown as a tattoo design on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly above an open hand design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink line drawing on white paper shows a butterfly with outstretched wings above an open hand, joined by dotted guide lines forming a triangle. The wings use stippled dotwork shading and fine lines, while the hand is drawn with cross-hatching and fine contour lines. The design is monochrome and centred, with a black pen and an eraser placed at the left edge of the frame.

Dotwork Butterfly Hand Moth Dotted line Triangle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The moth had been battering the lamp glass since before the second bell, and you were still trying to coax it onto your palm when the Ellen Dray came round the point without a light showing. Your father would have taken the stairs two at a time. You stayed where you were, one hand cupped beneath the creature's wings, and counted the seconds the way he had taught you.

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The trick, he used to say, was to let the thing choose the open hand over the fist. A moth will fly to warmth if you give it nothing to grab. You held your breath. Its wings were the colour of wet slate, dusted at the edges with a grey that came off on your skin like flour, and each time it lifted you felt the faint tug of it deciding. Below on the rocks, a lantern swung, steadied, and swung again. Someone aboard was reading the channel by the dark shape of the cliff.

When you finally lifted your hand toward the lamp housing, the moth went with it, up and sideways into the brass frame where the light had been dying. The beam stuttered, caught, and threw itself out across the water in a long white bar. You watched the Ellen Dray turn toward it. Nobody on board would ever know that the thing guiding them in was a moth coaxed off the glass by a girl's open palm.

Later, with the stairs cold under your feet, you opened your father's logbook on the desk and wrote in the margin: Light restored, two in the morning. One moth, released.