Black and grey dotwork butterfly inside a diamond outline, tattooed centrally on the upper back below the neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly in a diamond on the upper back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed butterfly with spread wings sits at the centre of a fine diamond outline on the upper back. The wings are shaded with stippled dots and short hatched strokes, with solid black edging and a segmented body. Faint dotted linework extends from the diamond's sides, and the image is in black and grey against a pale, softly lit background.

Dotwork Geometric Back Butterfly Diamond Dot Geometric shape 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

The lamps along Sable Quay had been going out one by one since the autumn, and nobody in the wardens' hut could say why. Mirela Foss was sent down with a tin lantern and a ledger and told to write the name of every lamp that failed before midnight.

Keep reading

She walked the quay for three nights and wrote down eleven names. Each one belonged to a lamp hung by a man who had since died, and each iron cage bore a small scratched mark: a diamond with a dot at every corner. On the fourth night a grey moth lifted off the black water and settled on her sleeve. Its wings were pricked all over with tiny dots, like frost on a window, and edged hard in ink.

She followed it. It went from lamp to lamp along the quay, rising and settling, and wherever it rested the light came back. At the last lamp, under the old customs house, it stopped on the diamond scratched in the iron and did not move. Mirela laid her thumb on the mark, and the wings opened once, slowly, and she understood that the lamps had never been failing. They had been waiting for someone to count them properly.

She wrote twelve names in the ledger before dawn. The last was the lamp under the customs house, and beside it she drew a diamond with a dot at each corner, so that whoever came next would know where the light had gone and where it had found its way back.