Black ink butterfly tattoo with lace-like wing patterns and dotted trailing lines, in a blackwork style, on a person's upper back over the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lace-patterned butterfly on a shoulder blade

Blackwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A large butterfly fills the upper back and shoulder blade, with wings built from solid black areas, fine outlines and open lace-like cell and scallop patterns. Thin lines trail from the wing edges and end in small dots, adding a dotwork accent. The tattoo is entirely black and grey, and the composition follows the curve of the shoulder.

Blackwork Dotwork Shoulder Back Butterfly Lace Wing Dot Pattern

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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

Pull your chair nearer the stove, because the wind off the point gets into the bones of a story if you let it. You'll not have heard of Hester Dunn, and that's no great wonder, for she lived out on the Skerry Light where nobody came but the supply boat and the odd gull with ideas above its station. She kept the lamp for her husband Tom until his chest gave out, and after that she kept it for herself.

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Every night in the wet months the moths came crawling in from the heather and beat themselves silly against the glass. Hester hated them. They got into the wick, they dusted the lens, they scorched their little wings to nothing. So she took her bobbins and her pins and, to keep her hands from shaking in the cold, she began to make lace. Not the cobweb sort you see in parlours, mind. Lace worked in black thread, heavy and close, cells like honeycomb and scallops like the lip of a shell. She'd pin it to the table and work until the lamp needed trimming.

Then one night in October a moth came in that was too big for any moth she'd seen. Its wings were black as the tar on the boat, edged with a stitch so fine it looked drawn by a needle's point, and from the edges hung threads tipped with tiny beads, as if it had caught the dew on its way across the water. It never touched the flame. It circled the lamp, slow as a clock hand, and settled on the back of her chair.

She finished the lace that night. In the morning the chair was empty, and the pattern she'd left pinned to the table had been worked into a shape like a pair of wings, with beads at every loose end. The keepers' log says the light burned true all that winter. I've never once known it to need trimming.