Black ink flash sheet of ornate butterfly, dragonfly, hummingbird, flower and ladybird tattoo designs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental insect and hummingbird flash sheet

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A flash sheet of five separate designs on a white background: a butterfly, a dragonfly, a hummingbird, a flower and a ladybird. Each motif is filled with dense, decorative swirls, scrollwork and dotted detail in solid black line work. The designs are in black ink only, arranged in a loose stacked layout with open space between them.

Blackwork Butterfly Dragonfly Hummingbird Flower Ladybird

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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 moths came first that August, so thick against the lamp glass that my father swore he could hear them, a dry tapping like rain that hadn't made up its mind. He wound the clockwork every four hours regardless, and every four hours I climbed the iron stairs with a cloth to wipe the soot of their wings from the panes.

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Mam had left a pattern book behind when she went to Hull, its cover soft as a boiled glove, full of lace designs she had copied from a Nottingham warehouse. Butterflies with their wings packed with curls, dragonflies with dotted tails, a ladybird like a shield. I spent a week tracing them onto oiled card with a pin and a borrowed nib, then cut the shapes out with the galley knife, until I had a row of black silhouettes I could clip to the shutters on the seaward side.

The gale came in October and took the second lamp. In the dark my father said the moths would have us all, and I stood on the gallery in my oilskin and watched something small and quick come out of the spray. It was a hummingbird, of all the impossible things, blown across from the Dutch coast, and it hung in front of the cut card as if the inked whorls were a garden. It stayed there while the sea climbed the rocks below us, sipping at the dotted curls, until the wind dropped and it was gone east.

In the morning my father took the pattern book from my hands, turned to the hummingbird, and said nothing at all. He pinned the card back up himself, the thing he had always called foolishness, and left it there until the relief boat came.