Black line design of a butterfly with cut-out wing panels, set within an open heart outline and accompanied by a five-petal flower, leaves and petals, on a white flash sheet.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly within a heart with flowers

Black and grey · Flash

The design shows a butterfly with patterned, cut-out wing panels, its body and antennae drawn in solid black. An open heart outline frames the butterfly, with leaf and petal shapes along its top and left edges, a five-petal flower at the lower left, and loose petals scattered nearby. The artwork is solid black on a plain white background, with no shading and no colour.

Butterfly Heart Flower Leaves Petal

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

The stencil sheet had been wedged behind the flour bins since before my time, and Cathal swore it had come off a ferry bound for the breakers in Hull. Four butterflies, each inside its own lopsided heart, with a ring of flowers chasing their edges as if someone had been bored on a long crossing. I was scraping burnt sugar off the grill plate when I found it, and I thought nothing of it except that the cut-outs were clean and the card was still stiff.

Keep reading

By the Tuesday run the galley was a mess of tea towels and sugar dust, and the third engineer wanted something for his mother's birthday. I dusted icing sugar through the wing panels onto a sponge that had come out lopsided, and the pattern held. Every little window in the wings let the white through, so the butterfly sat on the cake as if it had landed there. Cathal stood at the hatch with his arms folded and said nothing for a full minute, which from him was praise.

The stencil wore out on the second night. A wing tore along a fold, so I cut a fresh one from the back of a laminated safety notice, using the same hooked knife, and when I lifted it away the butterfly came out a shade sharper than the original. Galley work is like that. You copy a thing until the copy starts correcting the original.

Mrs Ormerod's cake went ashore at Harwich with the heart still whole. I kept the old sheet in my apron pocket after that, folded in four, and when the swell came up I'd take it out and count the petals by the light of the porthole, five to a flower, the same as always.