Black and grey dotwork drawing of a butterfly with wings filled with overlapping circle and flower-of-life patterns, shown on pale paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric butterfly design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A butterfly with outstretched wings is drawn in black ink on a pale background. The wings are filled with overlapping circular geometric patterns, with bands of solid black and open panels, and the body and antennae are shaded with stippled dots. The design is centred and shown from above with the wings fully spread.

Dotwork Geometric Butterfly Wing Flower of life Geometric pattern Circle Antennae

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You arrive at Mrs Halloran's boarding house in Morecambe in late October, when the front rooms are let to nobody and the back rooms smell of wet gabardine. She hands you a key on a brass fob shaped like a pinwheel and says breakfast is at eight, not a minute after, because the sea keeps its own timetable and she keeps hers.

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The room has wallpaper of overlapping rings, each circle touching six others, so the eye keeps finding flowers where there are only the spaces between them. On the first night you trace them with a pencil stub, the way you once traced the coastline of a country you never meant to visit. By the third morning you can name the petals. By the fifth you have stopped counting and started listening to the pipes behind the paper, which knock in a rhythm that is almost regular and never quite is.

On the last evening Mrs Halloran comes up with a reel of linen thread and asks if you'd hold one end while she measures the landing for a new runner. You hold. She walks to the stairs, winding the thread around her fist, and stops beneath a panel where the paper has gone yellow at the edges. That pattern, she says, was her mother's, drawn freehand on the back of a tide table in 1951. Every lodger who has ever asked about it has checked out before the tide turned.

You leave on the morning ferry with the pencil tracing folded in your coat. Looking back from the rail, you see the house's bay windows catching the low sun, a row of pale circles set into the grey front, each one touching the next, and you understand that the wall was never the pattern. The house was.