Black ink flash drawing of a pair of mirrored butterfly wings with dotted patterns and curled antennae, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mirrored butterfly wings design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical pair of butterfly wings drawn in black ink on a white background, with the two wings mirrored across the centre. The wings are filled with dots, scalloped edges and teardrop-shaped motifs, and the thin outlines end in curling spirals at the top and tapering tails at the bottom. The design is monochrome and centred with plenty of empty space around it.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mason's lad has left the second half of the panel face down on the trestle, and you are the one who has to turn it over. Outside, rain comes sideways through the open nave of Hollinbrook Castle, where the roof went in the winter your grandmother was born and nobody has troubled to mend it since. The glass is old and thick as a thumbnail, painted with a pair of wings that once faced each other across a window arch. Someone has cracked them down the spine, one side dark with lead, the other pale and unfinished.

Keep reading

Matching the halves is your job this week, because Mrs Abernethy from the estate office wants the panel shipped to Edinburgh by Friday. You lay the left wing over the right and count the dots: forty-one along the upper edge, forty-one along the lower, the teardrops marching in the same ranks on each side. Whoever made it was not careless. The curled tendrils at the top were cut with a diamond point, and at the bottom the tails taper to nothing, as if the glass were still deciding where to stop.

On the third night you find the thing that does not fit. Tucked behind the lead of the right wing there is a scrap of paper, folded small, with a pencil sketch of the same wings, except one dot has been shifted a finger's width to the left. A correction, or a joke, or a signature. You hold it to the lantern until the grease spot on the paper goes translucent, and you think of the arch above you with all its missing glass, and wonder which of the two wings the window was ever meant to keep.

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