Solid black silhouette design of a butterfly with swirling vine stems, leaves and dots on a white background, shown as a flash drawing with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly and leaf vine design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A solid black silhouette of a butterfly with its wings partly patterned by thin white veins sits at the lower right of the design. Curling vine stems, pointed leaves and small open circles extend up and to the left, forming a flowing, asymmetrical composition. The image is monochrome, with bold black shapes on a plain white background.

Blackwork Botanical Butterfly Leaves Vine Swirl Dot Wing

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, sit down, the bride will forgive me for keeping the soup waiting. My grandmother's vine grew over the wash-house wall at Penrose, and it never once flowered in her lifetime, so she told the lane it was shy.

Keep reading

The butterfly came in the third week of June, when the ground was dry and the whole village was out at the chapel fête. It was black as a bootlace, black as a rook's wing, and it would not settle on any bloom in the parish. Old Tamsin Keel swore it was looking for one particular leaf, so she went out with a pail of rainwater and her kitchen scissors.

Here's the turn. She clipped the vine at the root, carried the cut stem down to the sea wall, and dropped it into the tide. Four days later the leaves had gone silver with salt, the little round seeds had split open into pearls, and the butterfly sat on the topmost one with its wings spread, the white veins lit like a window at dusk. Tamsin had been a widow eleven years by then. Nobody asked what she had asked the sea for, and nobody needed to.

So when you lift your glass to these two, mind the bottom of the bottle, because that vine climbs toward anyone brave enough to ask it a question.