Black and grey drawing sheet of several butterflies on a white background, with hatched and stippled wing patterns and one large swallowtail-style butterfly at the top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly study sheet in black and grey

Black and grey · Flash

A sheet of five butterflies drawn in black ink, with one large swallowtail-style butterfly across the top and smaller spotted and eyed butterflies arranged around it. The wings are rendered with fine hatching, stippling and bold dark markings, in an engraved illustration style. The plain white background and open spacing make each butterfly easy to separate, which suits its use as a design sheet.

Butterfly Moth Wing Insect Spots

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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

In the kingdom of Ambrel, where the rivers ran uphill on feast days, the Royal Cataloguer was a thin man called Osric Vell. He kept pins in his cuffs and had never learned to swim. The king had ordered him to draw every winged thing in the realm before the spring fair, so Osric walked the hedgerows with a net, a drawing board, and a pot of ink that smelled of walnut.

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On the ninth day he caught a swallowtail as wide as a cart's shadow, black and cream and striped like a sail. It fought the net so hard it tore a hole through the mesh. Near the edge of its hindwing were two blue eyes, and when Osric looked at them, they blinked. He drew it anyway, every vein and every hatched shadow. While he worked, others came down out of the hawthorn: a grey moth with spotted wings, a small brown creature with rings like copper coins, a dark one with eyes along its lower edge. They settled on his board in a loose ring, as though they had come to be counted.

The king arrived at dusk to see the sheet. He held it to the lamp and called it a fine likeness, then asked why the eyes on the page were looking at him. Osric had not drawn them that way. He had only copied what was there. When the king touched the paper with his thumb, it left an ink smudge in the shape of a wing.

The sheet hangs in the long gallery now, with five butterflies arranged in their ring. The guards say that at dusk, when the lamps are lit, the eyes on the page are open a little wider than they were the night before.