Black linework tattoo design on tracing paper showing an hourglass with scrollwork, a butterfly and blossoms, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hourglass with butterfly and flowers design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of a tattoo design on pink tracing paper. An hourglass shape sits at the centre, filled with ornate scrollwork, with a butterfly on the right and open blossoms around the top and bottom. The lines are even and the design is shown in outline only, with no shading or colour ink.

Botanical Hourglass Butterfly Flower Blossom Scrollwork Design

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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

The tracing paper came in rolls from a stationer on Whitefriargate, and Nell Harcourt cut it to the length of a forearm with her mother's dressmaking shears, which she kept for nothing else. She always laid the hourglass down first. The glass had to be true, two round bellies pinched at the waist, the frame drawn so the sand looked like it was resting rather than falling. Everything else could be argued with afterwards.

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Inside the top bulb she drew scrollwork instead of sand, curl folding into curl until the glass looked full of something that had decided to stay put. Her brother Tom had sent the butterfly from Valparaiso on a postcard, pinned to a sheet of brown paper, and she copied its wings onto the right-hand side with them spread a little too wide, the way he had described them, as if it were trying to leave the page. Blossoms went above and below, open five-petalled flowers she had picked from the yard behind the chapel, their stems tangling with the frame.

She inked everything with a steel nib and never shaded. Her father had said shading was for people who could not commit to a line, and she had believed him for thirty years.

The stationer's boy asked once why the designs were never coloured. Nell told him the colour was not hers to give. She posted each sheet to a parlour in Hull, where some stranger she would never meet pressed it onto a stranger's skin, and the finished work came back to her only as a story told over the counter. Before the last sheet went out she turned it over and traced the hourglass backwards, so that from the other side the sand would fall the right way.