Black and grey dotwork drawing of a pair of ornate scissors whose blades form the body of a butterfly with outstretched wings.

Butterfly scissors design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical drawing of a pair of scissors with ornate scrolled handles that become butterfly wings at the top, with the blades forming the body below. The wings and handles are rendered in fine linework with stippled dotwork shading, giving soft grey tones across the metal and wing veins. The design is centred on a pale grey textured background with a faint dashed vertical line running through the middle.

Dotwork Scissors Butterfly Wing Blade

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 bronze shears came to you wrapped in a fleece that smelled of cedar, and the old tailor Lysandros told you not to let them touch the wool until you understood what they were for. You were nineteen and had never been given a rule about scissors before. You turned them over in the lamplight and saw the handles, curled like the ram's-horn scrolls on the temple gate, and at the top of each curl a pair of wings pressed flat, veined with thin ridges of metal.

Keep reading

For a month you cut nothing but scraps. Then a woman from the harbour quarter brought a bolt of linen that had been her mother's and asked for a length that would not fray. You hesitated. The shears felt lighter in your hand than they should, and when the blades met the cloth they sang one low note, like a moth knocking against a lamp. The line ran true. She paid you in figs and left without looking back.

Lysandros laughed when you told him. He said the shears had been made by a smith on Aegina who ground the blades so fine they could split a hair held in the air, and that the wings were there to remind the cutter that every edge is also a door. Then he took the shears from you and cut the thread of his own unfinished cloak in a single stroke, and watched the two halves drift apart onto the floor.

You kept the shears. Each dawn you open them once and close them, and the wings lift as though they mean to leave, and you never let the blades rest on wool that is not already finished.