Black lace-patterned butterfly tattoo with curled antennae on the upper back, in blackwork style.

Lace-pattern butterfly on upper back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A small butterfly tattoo with wings filled in a black lace-like pattern of scrolls, loops and mesh, with curled antennae at the top and a thin body below. The linework is crisp and the ink is solid black with fine grey tones in the lighter areas of the wings. The tattoo sits centrally on the upper back against lightly reddened skin, with plain background around it.

Blackwork Back Butterfly Lace Wing Antennae Scroll

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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

Put another log on, Tomas, and keep your hands off the cloth, because this is a tale about lace, and lace forgives nothing. Brigitte Vael came down to the Lys crossing one wet March with a cushion on her lap and a butterfly pinned to it. The thread was black as a chimney at midnight, worked into scrolls and loops and little mesh squares so fine the lamp shone through them.

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Hendrik Dhaene, the customs man, was not a cruel man, only a tired one. He turned the cushion over, pricked it with his knife, then held the butterfly up to the lantern. Light passed through its wings the way it passes through a church window. 'Duty on lace is by the yard,' he said. 'This is perhaps a hand's width.' She told him it was not for sale. It was a pattern, she said, and patterns are not taxed, because nobody in the ministry had yet thought how. He laughed, and that was her mistake, because a laughing man wants to be fair.

He let her keep it, on one condition: she would teach his daughter the curl that finishes each wing. So the pattern crossed the border the honest way, through a girl's fingers and not in a bodice at all. Brigitte's butterfly still hangs in a glass case in the customs house, and on wet nights, when the lamp is set just so, its shadow falls across the wall in a little flight of loops, going east, though it was made to go west.