Close photograph of a large black and grey blackwork and dotwork butterfly tattoo with filigree wings on a person's lower abdomen, above the navel.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate black butterfly on the stomach

Blackwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A large butterfly with symmetrical wings sits centrally on the lower abdomen, above the navel. The wings are filled with fine lattice, scrollwork and dense dotted shading, with a bold black outline and a textured ornamental body. The image is black and grey, shot close and slightly dim against a plain skin background with a dark garment at the top edge.

Blackwork Dotwork Other Butterfly Filigree Swirl Lattice Ornament Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lace frames hung in my mother's front room for thirty-one years, and nobody in Dunmore Street was allowed to touch them. My father sold the house the week after her funeral, but he let me take the frames down myself, one by one, with a butter knife to lift the brass tacks. Behind the last one was a pencilled sheet of paper, and on it, in her cramped hand, a butterfly drawn from the top down, its wings split into squares like a fishing net.

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I knew then what she had been doing at the kitchen table every winter, the lamp pulled low and the radio murmuring the shipping forecast. She never once told me the pattern came from her own mother, who had worked bobbin lace in Honiton before the mill closed. She said only that you could hide a whole life in a grid if you were patient enough to count every hole.

The Honiton man at the auction house wanted the frames for their oak. He turned them over, glanced at the cream lattice and the scrolled edges, and asked if the moths had been stitched or painted. I told him they were done by hand, every spiral, and that one of them was still missing its last wing. He did not ask where the wing had gone. I did not think I could explain that I had folded it into my own handbag that morning, and that it was still there, pinned between two pages of the recipe book.