Black ink flash sheet of seven butterfly designs on white paper, drawn in bold tribal-style linework with swirling flourishes and no body placement shown.

Butterfly flash sheet in black linework

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

The sheet shows seven butterfly designs drawn in black ink on white paper, arranged in loose rows and angles. Most have bold solid wing shapes with inner curls, while others use thin outlines, swirling antennae and decorative flourishes. The image is in black only, with no colour or shading.

Blackwork Butterfly Wing Swirl Flourish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

No, leave the lantern be, the moths only burn themselves on it, and we've had enough burning this voyage. Shift your stool out of the spray and listen. You've seen the black butterflies that bother the rigging off the Azores, folded up like pages torn from a ledger. The old hands say they're bad luck. They're not. They came aboard at Falmouth in the year the Marigold sailed with forty barrels of salt and a cabin boy called Tobias Penhale, who couldn't tell a bowline from a bishop but could draw anything with a bottle of soot and a quill.

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He sketched them in the margins of the log, first thin as spider silk, then bolder, with curls at the feet and little hooked feelers that trailed like string from a kite. The mate laughed and the captain tore out the pages for kindling. But the weather turned that March, and the sea came over the bow in grey sheets, and in the worst of it Tobias sat under the forecastle with a tin of ink, painting wings on the spare mainsail canvas because his hands needed something to do besides hold on.

When the storm broke we found the canvas hung wet on the foreline, and every wing on it was lifting, as if the cloth itself wanted to be somewhere warmer. Tobias was asleep against a cask, ink to the wrists. We ran for Lisbon that week with a sail nobody would touch.

And here's the thing you won't believe. At the quay, the ink had dried into a hundred little black shapes, and when the wind came off the Tagus they lifted off the cloth one by one and went up over the harbour wall, and they're still up there, circling the church tower, waiting for a boy to come back and finish their tails.