Black ink flash drawing of a butterfly with patterned wings and a flowing fine line vine trailing downward, shown on a plain white background.

Butterfly with flowing vine line design

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing of a butterfly with a dark, patterned wing design, the wings filled with open cells and dots. Below the butterfly, a thin, sweeping line curls and trails downward, with small dots scattered along it. The design is shown on a plain white background with no skin or body part visible.

Fine line Butterfly Vine Swirl Dot

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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

Don't look at the drop yet, lad, we're not at the bad bit. Sit on that stone. The wind up here takes the words out of your mouth and throws them into the valley, so you'll have to lean in closer than usual.

Keep reading

My mother's mother walked this pass with a basket of salt on her back the winter the Harrow bridge went. Halfway up, where the path bends under the grey overhang, she found a butterfly lying on the snow, its wings open like a shut book with the pages cut out. Its cells were dark and full of light where the wind had worn them thin. She said it was not dead. It was waiting for something to climb.

So she did the foolish thing. She pulled a vine from the rock wall, the kind that grows where nothing should, wound it round her wrist and held the loose end out. The butterfly crawled up it, slow as a clock hand, and when it reached her knuckles it lifted and flew down the mountain ahead of her, dropping small specks of dust on the path so she could find her way.

She followed those specks for three days. They led her past the frozen tarn, past the cairn of lost shepherds, right to the door of the house where her husband had kept a lamp lit in the window the whole time. He had not gone out once. The vine was still on her wrist when she came in, and it was green.

That is the whole of it. If you want to know what happened to the salt, ask your uncle. He sold it.