Red line drawing of a heart with a butterfly perched on its top edge, with flowing, tapered strokes on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly and heart line design

Colour · Flash

A red line drawing shows an outlined heart with a butterfly resting on its upper edge. The butterfly has wings drawn with open, looping outlines and small oval markings, while the heart and a trailing curl below it use tapered strokes that thicken and thin along their length. The design is shown in a single red ink on a plain white background.

Heart Butterfly Line art Ribbon

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 arrive at Saltcote in October, when the boarding house on Ferrier Terrace has one room left and Mrs Oddie has already tied a length of red wool around the key to room four. She says nobody else wanted the room with the sea in its window, and you pay for three weeks in advance because the rain has got into your bones.

Keep reading

Mornings you walk the groyne with a sketchbook you never open. A small brown butterfly, late for its season, keeps finding the iron rail beside you. It rests there, opening and closing its wings like a page being turned, and you start counting its visits the way other people count trains.

On the last Thursday the wind comes off the water hard enough to lift the slates. The butterfly lands on the red wool at the end of your key, and you hold very still while it walks the loop. Mrs Oddie watches from the hall with her arms folded and remarks that it has been doing that all week, and she had assumed it was after the wool.

You don't take the key back down to the desk. Instead you unwind the thread, knot it round the railing of the groyne, and let the wind carry the loose end down over the grey shingle, the red line unspooling until the sea finally takes it.