Black blackwork butterfly tattoo with lace-style wing patterns, fine dotwork edging and a small teal jewel on the body, shown on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lace-patterned butterfly on upper back

Blackwork · Back · Mixed · Photo

A butterfly with wings filled with ornamental lace-like motifs, scrollwork and rows of fine dots, outlined in bold black ink. The wings are mostly solid black with pale negative-space shapes, and a small teal jewel sits at the centre of the body. The collage shows the full tattoo above and two close-up crops below, all on smooth skin.

Blackwork Dotwork Back Butterfly Lace pattern Scrollwork Dot Jewel Ornament

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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 lace came down off the ghost train at six, when the lorries were already idling on the verge of Hallam Common. Ada had said it could be unpicked by one pair of hands, and so it was yours: a ladder, a penknife, and forty yards of black cotton that had been stitched into the shape of wings, scrolled and dotted like the hem of a mourning dress.

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Halfway up, you found the butterfly. It was painted over the ticket hatch, black where the paint had cracked to pale, every wing filled with little swags and rows of pinprick spots, and at its heart a green glass jewel the size of a boiled sweet that the carousel man had screwed on for luck. Nobody had ever told you where it came from. Ada said her father painted it the year the fair first crossed the bridge at Stoke, and that the moths in the lamps would come down to look at it all night.

You worked until the light went grey. The lace came away in long dark ribbons, and each one you rolled and handed down to Ada, who packed it in a trunk with the mirrors. When the last panel lifted, the hatch was bare wood with a pale ghost of wings on it, and the jewel was loose in your hand, still warm from the bulbs.

Ada climbed up to take it from you. "Keep it," she said, "the moths will want something to look at." You put it in your pocket and went down the ladder as the first lorry pulled away, and somewhere behind the trees a single lamp was still burning over an empty field.