Black ornate butterfly tattoo with dotwork detail and curled antennae on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Ornate butterfly tattoo on the upper back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind, showing a black butterfly tattoo on the upper back beside the shoulder blade. The wings are filled with bold solid black sections, interlaced scrollwork and rows of small dots, and the antennae end in curled swirls with tiny dots. The skin is pale against a dark brown backdrop and a dark satin ruffled garment.

Blackwork Dotwork Back Butterfly Wing Dot Swirl Antennae Scrollwork

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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

You learn the colliery's rhythm before you learn the names of the streets. Cage bells at six, the hooter at two, and between them the women of Tir Bach counting the lamps that come back up the shaft. Your mother keeps the lamp-room ledger now that your father's chest has gone, and she hands you the pencil with a look that says the sums will not do themselves. Tonight they will not add at all. Lamp fourteen came up dark, and Evan Probert, who carries it, has not come up with it.

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The lamp-room smells of paraffin and wet wool. You sit on the upturned crate by the hooks and trace the old pattern your grandfather pricked into the brass check tags: a butterfly with wings like beaten shields, the edges stippled with tiny holes so the light falls through in dots. He said the men once pinned them inside their jackets for luck, and that a butterfly was only a moth that had been down a mine and come out braver. You do not believe him. You turn the tag over and over under the bulb.

At half past three the cage rattles. Nobody runs. Evan steps out grey to the eyebrows, lamp swinging from his fist, and behind him his mate Dai with a bandaged hand and a grin like a cut loaf. "Fourteen's wick was soaked," Evan says, "so I held on to the wall and sang at it till they heard me." He hands you the lamp. Its glass is cracked clean across, and someone has chalked a small wing on the gauze.

You hang it on its hook with the others. By morning the chalk will be gone, washed off by the first pail, but you know the shape of it now. You take the brass tag from your pocket and punch one more hole in the wing, where the light can get through.