Fine line black tattoo of a butterfly with dotted lace drapes on the ribs just below the bust.

Butterfly with lace drapes under the bust

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black outline butterfly sits centrally on the skin beneath the bust, with a scalloped lace-like border above it and strings of dotted lines and small teardrop shapes falling below. The linework is thin and uniform, with dotted details and a few small areas of shading in the wings. The tattoo is shown in black ink on warm skin, with a peach top pulled up above it and a navel piercing with a clear stone below it.

Fine line Dotwork Ribs Butterfly Lace Dot Teardrop Moth

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

Now sit close, because the lamp won't last the telling and I'll not be shouting over the wind for you. You want to know why Tom Prideaux kept a moth in his tin? It came down Hollow Pit on the back of the first cage in March, when the frost was still on the headgear, and it settled on his lamp glass as if someone had sent for it.

Keep reading

The women of Crag Row had a net of white lace hung over the chapel window, and the moth's wings were that same pattern, scalloped at the edge like the work Mrs Ogle did at her bobbin. Under the wings it let fall its little strings of dots, and at the end of each string a drop hung, the way rain hangs off the tipping gear after a shower. Tom said it was a lady's petticoat that had gone down the pit to dress the dark.

The winter the north level flooded, the water came up through the old stope faster than the pumps could take it. Tom was last out, and his lamp was going dim. The moth lit on the glass and would not leave, and when he looked down the drift, every drop along the roof was lit up like a bead, a path of them running up the slope toward the shaft. He followed them, every one, and came out into the cold with the lamp's last light still in his hands.

He hung the tin on a nail above the mantel until the day he died. Every spring the moth came back to that cold lamp, and every spring the lace in the chapel window had a new hole in it, the size of a wing. Don't ask me which of them was the lady. Drink your tea.