Black line drawing of a butterfly with outspread wings, built from dots and small oval shapes, shown as a dotwork flash design with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dotwork butterfly design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical butterfly with outspread wings and curved antennae, drawn in black outline on a white background. The wings are filled with rows of small open circles and elongated ovals, with radiating lines running from the body across the forewings. The body is a narrow segmented shape with a dotted pattern, and the image is a flat, uncoloured design.

Dotwork Butterfly Wing Dot Antennae Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pricking table smelled of paraffin and the cold tea I forgot to drink every morning. Mr Haskins had left a card on my bench with a note pinned to it: a butterfly for the Ellison girl's veil, wings pricked the old way, no machine pattern, because he wants it to look like somebody meant it. I laid the tracing paper over the cartridge, weighted its corners with two brass buttons, and started with the body, because a wrong body throws off the whole thing.

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The pin went through with the rhythm my mother taught me, a tap and a turn. Rows of small rounds first, then the ovals along the forewings, which took longest because each one needed its own angle. The radiating lines I left until last, a fan of pinholes running out from the thorax like the spokes of a wheel that had been dropped and set down again. By the time the factory whistle went I had a dozen mistakes in the margin and not one I could bear to throw away.

Holding the sheet up to the window that evening, I saw what the pins had really made. Light came through every hole, so the whole butterfly glowed against the glass, a thousand small suns set in a black field. In the morning Mr Haskins would carry the card down to the embroiderers, and the women would stitch silk over my holes until nobody could find a single one.

I knew they would not see the pinpricks again. I also knew the veil would catch the light at the wedding exactly where I had meant it to, and that was enough to make me pick up the pin for the next one.