Black silhouette flash design of a butterfly resting beside a five-petalled flower and leaves, with swirling stems, shown on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly and flower design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The design shows a butterfly with a curled antenna, perched beside a five-petalled flower on a long stem. Two serrated leaves and sweeping curved stems frame the composition. It is rendered as solid black shapes with fine internal lines on the wings and leaves, with no greys or colour.

Botanical Blackwork Butterfly Flower Leaves Stem Swirl

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

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the cable under the hatch. Grandmother Oyelaran always said no tale starts until the lamps are turned to the proper blue, so wait for it. This one is about the black flower in the bay of Hollowmere Ring, and the clockwork moth that came to sit beside it.

Keep reading

The flower was the last of the old seed stock, and it had come up in the dust with its petals grey as ash. Ysolde Parrish, who kept the bay, couldn't bring herself to throw it out. She scraped the old picture from a drowned book, the one with the curled stems and the serrated leaves, and she cut new petals from black sheet because the real colour had gone out of the world long before. Every cycle the bay children set a little copper moth beside it, made by a toymaker called Tobiah Quill, with a feeler wound up like a fern. The other gardeners said it was foolishness. Ysolde said a flower with nothing to look at would forget how to open.

Then came the storm that ate the power lines. The lamps went down to a red glow, the air scrubbers coughed, and the children crowded into the bay because it was the warmest room left. The reserve cell had only enough charge for the scrubbers or the lamps, and Ysolde was reaching for the switch when she saw the moth's small wing-light blinking in the dark. It was throwing a clean white ring onto the black petals, and the stem had turned itself towards it the way stems do. She unclipped the moth, cradled it in her two hands, and held it under the flower until morning.

The moth still hangs over the hatch on a hook, its wing-light dark now, and nobody has ever dusted those black petals. Mind the cable, and lamps down.