Back view of a woman with her hair in a bun, showing a solid black butterfly tattoo on the nape of her neck, with a thin black band running across the neck beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly tattoo on the nape of the neck

Blackwork · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind with her hair tied in a bun, showing a solid black butterfly silhouette with cut-out wing detail on the nape of her neck. A thin black band crosses the neck just below the tattoo, and the bare back and shoulder are visible. The image is shot against a dark background with soft, low lighting, which keeps the focus on the tattoo and the skin.

Blackwork Neck Butterfly Back Hair bun

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

Sit closer, you, where the wind can't get at the fire. Aye, the old keep above Harrowgate is nothing now but a ring of wall and a gate that opens onto sky. But when my grandmother was a girl, there was a mason up there called Tobias Crane, and he had one daughter, Wren, who was never still.

Keep reading

She climbed the broken stair every morning to watch the swifts, and one spring she came down with a fistful of cut paper and a face like thunder. The lord's clerk had told her that her lace was worth nothing, that the castle would never pay a mason for ornament. So that night she took her father's chisel and went up to the great east window, the one with no glass left in it. By lamplight she cut the stone into wings, slowly, a little at a time, so the wind would pass through the gaps and the sound of it would carry down into the village like a hum.

Folk say that when the moths came, they settled on the sills and would not be shooed. In the morning the clerk stood in the courtyard looking up, and he could not say a word, for the sun came through those carved wings and laid their shadows across the flagstones, black and thin as lace, and every shadow seemed a little bit alive.

Wren never left the keep, they say. She only ever flew. And some nights, if you stand where the wall is broken and the wind is right, you can hear her chisel still, tapping, patient, making the lace.