A grid of sixteen black and grey butterfly line drawings and silhouettes on a white background, shown as tattoo design options with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Grid of sixteen butterfly designs

Black and grey · Flash

The image is a four by four grid of sixteen butterfly designs drawn in black ink and grey on a plain white background. The wings vary between delicate outline work, bold solid black silhouettes, ornate patterned panels and soft grey shading. Each butterfly is shown in a different pose and angle, with no colour ink used.

Butterfly Wing Insect

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom, Mr Hollis has at last let me hold the burnisher, though he watches my wrist the way a heron watches a ditch. I am enclosing the sheet you asked about, the one with sixteen butterflies he drew for the wallpaper people in Bradford. He pinned it above the bench and told me to study the wings and not the bodies, because the bodies are only hinges.

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The outlined ones he drew in a single morning, quick as breath, and he will not let me touch them. The solid black ones he inked from a bottle he keeps locked in the drawer, thick as tar, and he says a good wing is a shadow you can trust. The top row, third from the left, with the spirals like a window in St Mary's, he calls the Sunday one. He would not say why. I have stopped asking him things he is not ready to answer.

Yesterday I asked why none of them had any colour. He said the printers would add it later, some other hand with other pots, and the butterflies would never know the difference. I thought that the saddest thing I had heard all year, until I watched him sit down with a grey wash and shade the pale one at the bottom right, the one with feathered edges. He did it so lightly it looked as though it had only just settled there, and might lift off again if the window were opened.

I have tucked my own copy of the sheet into the biscuit tin with your old marbles. Come home at Michaelmas and we will see which wing you choose to copy first. I have already decided it will be the Sunday one, whatever Mr Hollis says. Your loving sister, Ada.