Black filigree design of a butterfly with scrolled wing panels on a white background, shown as a flat drawing with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Filigree scroll butterfly design

Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical butterfly silhouette filled with interlocking curled scrolls and open loops, drawn as solid black shapes. The linework is bold and uniform, with no shading, and the design is shown flat on a plain white background. The composition fills the frame evenly with the wings meeting at a narrow central body.

Butterfly Scroll Filigree Wing Ornamental

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit down, the lot of you, and mind the kettle, because this is the one about the lace-cutter's boy and the butterfly that wouldn't leave the window. My gran kept this house before me, and she swore it happened in the room at the top of the stairs, the one with the blue door that sticks.

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Ezra Quill came up from Ramsgate with a pair of brass shears and a crate of scrap ironwork, hired to mend the railings along the front. He was hopeless at railings. What he could do was cut scrolls, a curl and a curl inside it, so fine you could read the Gazette through them. Every evening he sat at the table by the window and cut a little silhouette out of black card: a butterfly, all loops and whorls, its wings made of the same shapes as the waves folding over on the shingle.

He pinned it to the glass. Next morning it had moved. Not much, a quarter inch toward the sea, as if it had been trying to get out through the gaps between the curls. He blamed the draught. He pinned it again, and again it had shifted. On the seventh morning there was a second butterfly pinned beside the first, the same size, cut by someone with steadier hands, and nobody in the house would own to it.

Ezra packed his shears on the Friday and took the train back north. The card butterflies stayed on the sill for years, my gran said, until the sea salt rotted them soft as lace, and the wind carried the last of the scrolls out over the harbour wall, one loop at a time.