Black line drawing of a butterfly made of geometric triangular facets, shown as a framed print on white, with no body placement.

Geometric butterfly line drawing

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A butterfly with both wings open, drawn in a symmetrical outline built from triangular facets. The linework is thin, even and black on a plain white background, and the wings are filled with a network of straight intersecting lines. The drawing is centred in a black frame with a wide white margin.

Geometric Fine line Butterfly Insect Wing Triangle Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Surveyor-Royal of Carrow had been given eleven years to measure the kingdom and four days to measure the flood that had swallowed the eastern marsh. Tobiah Wrenn set his theodolite on the church tower at Lisk, sighted the sluice gate at Haddon Mere, then the bell at Orme, and wrote each angle into a ledger with a pencil he kept sharpened with a penknife his father had left him.

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By the third night the ledger held a web of sightlines so fine that his clerk, a boy called Pim, refused to copy it without a lamp. Every line cut another, and every crossing made a small hard triangle, and none of the triangles would close. Wrenn tried the bells again, then the gates, then the three standing stones on Brack Hill that the old fishwives said had been set down by a tired giant. Nothing agreed with anything else.

On the fourth morning the mist lifted off the reeds and the lines settled, all at once, into a shape. Two wings lay open over the marsh, their facets sized exactly to the pools the water had left behind, and every sightline fanned back to a single point where the body would be. He understood then that the flood had not come from the sea. The marsh had been drawn first, by something too large to see from the tower.

He sent the outline to the crown in plain black ink with a note that the drainage order could not be signed. The king read it twice and let the sluice stay open. Pim still copies the drawing at night, one thin line at a time, and says it is never finished, only folded more tightly each season.