Black and grey hatched ink drawing of a butterfly wing merging into a dark rose, shown as a design on white paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly and rose ink drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A butterfly wing on the right blends into a dark, shadowed rose or bloom on the left. The drawing uses dense hatching, cross-hatching and stippled shading in black ink, with ragged edges along the wing and petals. The design is drawn on plain white paper with no body part or colour present.

Butterfly Rose Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the lamp, child, it's older than your grandmother's grandmother and it sulks if you jostle it. Now sit where the warm pipe runs under the bench, because the story happened in the Halberd Gardens, four hundred years out from Earth, where the only thing growing in the dark was one black rose that the old gardener, Oriel Mab, kept alive on a spoonful of water a week.

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The ship's doctors said it would die. The engineers said so too, and the ship's clock said so every time it ticked over another year with nothing green in the hold. But Oriel kept the rose in a cracked cup by the airlock, and every morning she breathed on its petals so they would not curl. One morning she found a butterfly resting on the thorn, its wings open like two pages nobody had finished reading. The right wing was whole and blue-black as a night shift. The left had gone soft and shadowed, bleeding into the petals until you could not tell where the insect stopped and the flower began.

Now, a butterfly cannot live in a sealed hold. Everyone knows that. So Oriel sat down on the deck and waited for it to fly off, and it did not. It opened its wings wider, and the rose opened too, one petal at a time, the way a mouth does when it has been waiting a long while to say something. Oriel said nothing. Some things are not for speaking.

The butterfly laid its eggs on the rose's stem that week, and by the spring cycle the stem had set one hard seed the size of a thumbnail. Oriel planted it in the soil bed behind the pumps, and it grew into a bush that filled the whole aft hold. That is why the Halberd still has a garden, and why nobody is allowed to shout near the airlock cup, even now.