Black ink drawing of an ornate butterfly with acanthus scroll wings and leaf detail, shown as a tattoo design without a body placement.

Ornate butterfly design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical butterfly is drawn with its wings filled by scrolling acanthus leaves, flowers and dotted accents. The linework uses fine pen strokes and cross-hatching to build shading across the wings and body. The design is shown in black and grey on a plain white background.

Botanical Butterfly Acanthus Scroll Leaves Flower Filigree

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The engraver at Pell's Yard had cut acanthus for thirty-one years and still could not make a leaf keep still under his burin. Ada Wrenfield set a silver locket on his bench, its lid already dented from a fall off the quay, and asked for a butterfly. Not a moth, she said, because moths only ever came out at night to be stepped on.

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Mr Pell told her a butterfly needed a body and two wings and nothing else, and so he drew one: a plain oval, two fans, a neat thread of antennae. Ada slid the paper back across the bench and laid her finger on the wing. "Leaves," she said. "Like the ones on the churchyard gate, going over and over. Something that grows on the way in and never quite finishes."

He worked through the winter under the lamp. Each scroll he cut turned back on itself into the next, until the wings were thick with curls and tiny dotted stars and the body was hidden under a knot of ferns. By February he could no longer find the butterfly beneath it, and he told her so, and she laughed for the first time since he had known her.

On the last evening she collected it and held the locket to the window, where the harbour lights were coming on one by one, and tilted it. The scrolls caught the light and seemed to lift off the silver. "There you are," she said, and Pell could not tell whether she meant the butterfly or the boat slipping past the wall. When he swept the filings into a paper afterwards, he found they had fallen into the shape of a wing.