Four black and grey butterfly designs stacked vertically on a white background, with detailed wing veining and stippled dot shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four butterfly designs in black ink

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

Four butterfly designs are arranged one above another on a plain white background, each shown from above with wings open. The wings are drawn with fine, detailed veining and outlined panels, with some areas filled by dense stippled dots, particularly on the lowest and largest butterfly. The drawings use only black ink and grey tones, with no colour.

Dotwork Butterfly Wing Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marguerite Obi had been inking the same four plates for nine days, and the printer on Hanover Lane had stopped asking when they would be ready. At twenty past eleven the studio above the bakery smelled of cold coffee and the sharp ink she used for veins. Outside, the 24 bus sighed at the lights, and the window threw her lamp back at her, so she drew with the blind half down.

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The plates were for the Quayside museum's catalogue of moths and butterflies collected before the war. Three of them she had copied faithfully from the drawers in the basement. The fourth had no specimen. Its label read only "Sheffield, Night, 1931" in a hand that pressed so hard the card had torn under the pen. Marguerite had spent an evening with a loupe on that tear, trying to decide whether the stippling on the lowest wing was dust or intention.

At half past midnight she gave up on the veins and went down to the lane. The gas-lit corner was empty except for a man sweeping a shopfront with a yard broom, and when she asked him whether he had seen anything pale moving over the rooftops, he looked at her as though she were drunk. Then, slowly, he pointed up. Above the chimney pots a dozen shapes turned in the sodium glow, wings open, dotted with the same marks she had been struggling to place.

She went back up and finished the fourth plate in twenty minutes. She drew what she could see, which was the truth of the matter: the stipples were not dust but scales rubbed loose by the city's soot, settling on the lower wing as the moth settled. In the morning she sent the printer all four plates with the window open. Flour from the bakery drifted in and sat down on the paper, and she left it there.