Mirrored pencil drawing of a pair of butterfly wings with a fine scroll between them, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Mirrored butterfly wings design

Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical drawing of two butterfly wings facing each other, with a delicate black scroll motif meeting at the centre. The wings are built from outlined scalloped sections and feathered shading in greys with a soft purple cast, showing the veins and eyespots on the lower wings. The design sits on a pale paper background with a gentle pink-to-white gradient.

Butterfly Wing Scroll Swirl Symmetry

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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 man in lane seven had declared one cardboard tube, contents 'drawings, personal, no commercial value', and when I slid the sheets out under the lamp my first thought was that someone had folded a butterfly in half and forgotten which half was the real one. Two wings faced each other across a crease, grey pencil gone soft with a purple cast, veins drawn in like the ribs of a leaf, eyespots on the lower wings no bigger than my thumbnail.

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'My mother's,' he said, before I could ask. 'She drew them every winter for the church fête. Says the trick is to draw one side and trust the paper to do the other.' He wanted to know whether a drawing needed a stamp to leave the country. I told him it didn't, and then I kept looking at it, which is not something I do with paperwork.

Where the two wings nearly touched there was a scroll, a pair of black curls like a question mark turned round to look at itself. He said it was the last thing she drew, and that it was where the wings were joined so they could be carried as one. Behind me the queue shifted and a van horn sounded twice. I should have stamped it and waved him on.

Instead I stamped the declaration and held the top sheet to the window. The purple had bled a little at one corner where a thumb had rested on it for years. 'Go on,' I said. 'She'd want them on the other side of the water.' He laughed, folded the sheets along the crease, and the wings closed like a book. The van finally moved up.