Neo-trad style lace butterfly tattoo in black and red on the upper back, with dotted chains and red gems hanging below it.

Lace butterfly with beaded drops on upper back

Neo-trad · Back · Mixed · Photo

A butterfly made to look like black lace sits centred on the upper back, with its wings built from scrolling, net-like patterns. Heavy black linework is paired with red and pink shading that shows through the wings and behind the body. Strings of dotted beads and small red gems hang beneath the butterfly, and the photo is taken from directly behind the wearer.

Neo-trad Back Butterfly Lace Bead Chain Gem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ada Pell had drafted lace patterns at the Sneinton mill for nineteen years, and in all that time she had never let a card leave the drawing room without her own mark on the corner. The mark was a small moth, pricked in pinholes so fine the setters swore they could feel it with a thumb. Nobody else at the mill drew insects. Lace was for hems and collars and the backs of mourning gloves, and a butterfly, Mr Haddon said, looked like something a sailor's wife might sew on a cushion.

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The spring the Jacquard frames were replaced, Ada was told to make a border of pattern cards for a new export order to Lisbon. She did not draw the borders. Instead she sat up late with the lamp turned low and built a butterfly from net and scroll, the wings crowded with eyes and loops, the body heavy enough to hold the whole piece down. Under it she hung a fringe of beads, one dot at a time, each drop a little shorter than the last, as though the moth were lowering itself into a bath of light. When the card went to the loom it came back as a bolt of black Chantilly with a ruby thread threaded through the ground.

Ada never saw the Lisbon order. What she saw, eleven months later, was a cutting pinned to the mill noticeboard by a woman from the finishing room, a photograph of a bride's shoulders, a mantilla edged with the same beaded drops and a red thread running through the black. The bride was nobody Ada knew. Her moth had gone out into the world without a signature, which was the trade's way, and for the first time in nineteen years Ada laughed aloud at her own desk.

She pricked a new card that evening with a single moth in the corner, the pinholes a little wider than before, so that anyone who looked closely would know whose hand had been there first.