Black and grey dotwork butterfly with a vertical arrow and geometric triangles tattooed on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly and arrow on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A butterfly with dotted wing shading sits at the centre of the design, with an arrow above it and a dotted horizontal line crossing beneath its wings. Below, a stylised line ornament leads to a pair of nested triangles, one filled with solid black and one shaded with stippled dots. The tattoo is in black ink and grey tones on a pale forearm, photographed from a slightly angled view with a person's legs and a patterned top visible in the background.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Butterfly Arrow Triangle Dotted line Geometric shape Wing

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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

Sit down, the stove's still warm, and mind the net, it's not dry yet. You want the Penhale story, the March fog one, and you'll get it right this time or I'll stop. Ada Penhale was sixteen and at the wheel of her father's crabber, the Morwenna, when the fog came down off the Runnel so thick you could lean on it. Her father had gone blind with a fever the week before, so it was her or nobody.

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She had a compass with a cracked glass and a rule her father had scratched into the wheelhouse door: keep the arrow on your left shoulder and the sea will keep you honest. His brother had painted that arrow, pointing north by west toward the harbour mouth. But the paint had flaked and the fog had swallowed it, and by two in the morning she couldn't tell which way it pointed. Then a moth came in through the open hatch, pale and dusted grey like the air itself, and settled on the compass glass as if someone had sent it.

Every time the Morwenna drifted, the moth lifted, flew off to one side and came back to the same spot. So she followed it. She kept the swell running under the keel like a dotted line she could feel through the planks, and when she heard the bell buoy her father always called the two marks, one solid and one speckled, she knew the channel was close.

They came into Newlyn at dawn with the engine coughing and the nets full of nothing much. Her father, sitting up in his bunk, asked her what the moth had been. She said she didn't know. He said it was the arrow his brother painted, come down off the door to see her home. I never believed that, and nor did Ada, but she kept the moth's dust on her palm until it wore off, and that's why nobody has ever painted over that door.