Black ink silhouette design of a butterfly with a flower and leaves on a plain white background, in a botanical style with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly and flower line design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A solid black silhouette of a butterfly with stylised wings sits above a five-petalled flower on a curling stem, with pointed leaves and a swirling tendril below. The design uses flat black fills and bold outlines with no shading or greys, set against a plain white background. It is a drawing of a design rather than a photograph of skin.

Botanical Butterfly Flower Leaves Stem Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and stop pulling at that rail. Fourteenth floor of Ashgrove House, nineteen seventy-one, and there was one geranium in the whole block that anybody bothered to water. Mr Pell kept it on the walkway in a paint tin with the label still on, and he talked to it every morning like it owed him rent.

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Then the wind came up off the car park and took his hat, and a butterfly came up with it, black as a bin bag and cut sharp at the edges. Nobody had seen one that high before. It landed on the geranium and folded its wings flat like a letter being posted, and the flower, which had been hanging its head all week, lifted up as if somebody had called its name from the kitchen.

The council men came in March with their clipboards. They wanted the walkways cleared and the tins binned, so Mr Pell stood in front of his flower with his arms out like a lollipop man. Ask him what he said and he'd tell you it was nothing much. Only that the butterfly would not go anywhere without the stem, and the stem would not stand without the leaves holding it up, and they could take the lot or leave the lot.

They left the lot. Every summer after, that butterfly came back to the tin and the flower opened for it, and you could set your watch by the pair of them. Now pass me the teapot, Kevin, and mind the tin on your way past. It's the only thing up here that has never once needed telling twice.