Black ink drawing of a butterfly with intricate swirling lace-like wings and curling antennae, shown as a flash design with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lace-winged butterfly design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical butterfly with open wings and long curled antennae, drawn as a solid black design. The wings are filled with fine swirling scrolls, lacy cut-out edges and branching linework that suggest filigree. The design is shown flat on a plain white background, with no skin visible.

Blackwork Butterfly Wing Lace Swirl Scroll Antennae Filigree

Find an artist for this

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 lacemaker of Vesk Lane had worked by candle for forty winters, and the city's night-watchmen knew her window by the thread-light that never went out. When the bell of St Oriel struck two, she would stop her bobbins and listen for the scrape of the river barges unloading below the bridge, and that was how she came to hear the moths.

Keep reading

They were not moths, her grandmother had said. They were the city's lost hours, folded small and sent to beg for their wings back. Most people shut their shutters against them. Ada Pellow did not. She had a box of black silk thread that no shop in the city would sell her, spun from the mourning veils of a widow who had paid her in advance and then died before the fitting. Ada had kept the thread and never asked what it was for.

One night a hour-moth came tapping at the glass, its feelers curled like the ends of a clock spring. Ada opened the sash and let it in, and it landed on her table and waited. She began the wings with the scroll at the shoulder, the way her hands had always known, and she cut the edges into points like the spires on the skyline. By the time the bell struck four the wings were finished and the moth lifted, its new black lace catching the lamplight, and flew out over the rooftops towards the dawn it had been missing.

Ada sat alone with her empty box and found the thread had not run out. Every night after that, somebody left a lost hour on her sill, and she mended them all, and the city slept a little more easily for it.