Black and grey butterfly tattoo with a geometric triangle and dotwork accents on a forearm.

Butterfly and triangle on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded butterfly with spotted wing detail sits above an outlined triangle, with a thin line and open diamond shape and a dotted trail below. The butterfly uses soft grey shading against bold black linework, while the geometric elements are drawn with clean, unshaded lines. The tattoo is shown in black ink and grey tones against a pale forearm and a purple textured background.

Geometric Dotwork Forearm Butterfly Triangle Geometric shape Diamond Dot Line

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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

Dilys Rennard had the night turn at Coldharbour Halt because nobody else would sit in the signal hut with the stove that smoked. At ten past two the last parcel train rattled through without stopping, and a tin trunk slid off the back of the mail van onto the platform. It was stencilled with a triangle and a small moth, the old lost-property mark from the days when the company ran its own clerks. She had never seen one before.

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Inside the trunk, wrapped in brown paper, were forty-odd tickets punched with dots instead of holes, a brass compass with its needle snapped, and a ledger of diamonds: pencil sketches of shapes that never quite closed, each with a thin line running off the edge of the page. The last entry was dated the week the halt opened. Beside it someone had drawn a butterfly, shaded grey at the wings, and written underneath: Return to the signal, she will know the way.

She did not know the way. She walked the down line with a storm lantern, counting the dotted sleepers the ledger described, until she reached the point where the rails bent into an arrow pointing at the old goods shed. The shed door stood open. Inside, on a shelf above a cold kettle, sat a second signal lamp with a red glass, and beside it a tin of moths pinned flat under card.

She trimmed the wick, pulled the lever for the first time in eleven years, and the lamp swung green down the track towards Manchester. Somewhere far off a whistle answered. She wrote the time in the log, 02.41, line clear, parcel delivered, then tucked the ledger under her arm and walked home before the milk cart came.