Traditional style flash drawing of a black butterfly wings filled with red roses, green leaves and blue and orange swirls, shown on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly with roses flash design

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A butterfly with black wings is filled with red roses, green leaves, and blue, orange and white swirling bands. The linework is bold and outlined in black, with flat areas of colour and white highlights on the petals. The design is centred on a plain white background, with the wings spread symmetrically.

Traditional Butterfly Rose Leaves Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The queen wanted her butterfly black, because black was the one colour my grandmother never managed to fix in cloth, and she had heard of it from the mill towns beyond the Sallow Hills. So for three winters I soaked oak galls and iron filings in the vat behind the bakehouse, and every spring the cloth came out grey at the edges. Ma Tesh said the trouble was my impatience. I said the trouble was the river, which had gone the colour of weak tea since the tanners moved upstream.

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On the feast of Lantern Week I finally drew a length of linen from the vat so dark it looked wet even when dry. I cut it into two wings with my good shears and sewed them to a body of pressed wool. The roses came next, because the queen wanted roses on everything she owned. I painted them red from madder root, green from nettle and sorrel, and left the petals white where the cloth showed through, the way a rose holds its light at the centre.

When the queen saw it she did not smile. She lifted one wing to the window and asked how much of the black was mine and how much was the river's. I told her the truth: the river had given me the colour, but I had given it the edge, the bold black line that kept the reds from bleeding into the blues. She was quiet a long while. Then she ordered the swirling bands of blue and orange stitched along the hindwings, the same ones the tanners' children had been painting on the sluice gate.

On the morning of the procession the butterfly was pinned to a pole above the crowd. A gust came off the Sallow, lifted both wings, and for a moment the roses flared against the grey sky, every outline sharp as a blade. Ma Tesh, who had called me impatient all my life, took my hand and said nothing at all.