Black line stencil of a butterfly over a geometric star design, held up on a clear transfer sheet by a hand with black nail polish.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly over geometric star stencil

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A hand holds a clear transfer sheet bearing a black stencil of a butterfly with wings spread over an overlapping eight-pointed geometric star. The butterfly uses fine outlines on the left wing and dotted stippled shading on the right wing, while the star is drawn with bold straight lines. The design is shown in black ink on a plain white background.

Geometric Dotwork Butterfly Stencil Wing Mandala Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the broken step, it has taken a horse's leg and a bishop's dignity. Forty winters back this fort was a star, the way the engineers drew it on paper, eight points so no gunner could hide in a blind corner. Captain Aske Lorimer kept the north point, and he kept a bundle of letters from a girl in Harrowgate inside his coat, though he could not read them in the dark.

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The trouble began with the butterfly. Every April a painted lady came over the glacis, its wings so thin the light came through them, one side crisp with veining and the other dusted like frost on a window. The men swore it was a sign. Lorimer swore it was a nuisance, because it kept settling on his chalk. He had drawn the star across the parade ground so each sentry knew where his line ran, and each morning the creature sat on the crossing of two lines at the centre, as though it had been posted there.

Then the peace men came with their treaty and their demand that the fort be surrendered by noon. The governor wanted the walls pulled down and the powder tipped into the moat. Lorimer walked his star line by line that night, counting the points, and understood what the engineers had known all along: every wall covered another, and no corner was left where an enemy could creep. He sent the gunners to their stations, posted the letters to his sister, and did not lift the bar on the gate.

At dawn the treaty men found him standing at the centre of his chalk star, the butterfly resting on the back of his hand, and not one line of it broken. Mind the step on your way out.