Pencil and red ink drawing of an ornate butterfly wing design with swirling filigree, shown on paper with no body placement.

Ornate butterfly wing design in pencil and red ink

Mixed · Flash

A hand-drawn butterfly design shown in side view, with a wing filled with swirls, curling scrolls, small floral motifs and tiny butterfly shapes. The linework is dark pencil and ink with heavy shading along the wing edges, and red ink highlights the wing tips, the body and several shapes inside the wing. The design fills the centre of a plain cream sheet of paper.

Butterfly Wing Swirl Filigree Flower Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pattern had come off the drawing board wrong, and Hettie Lowe knew it before the bobbins had made their first full turn. Down the left wing the scrolls kept curling back on themselves like fern heads, but the third spiral had been pricked a hair too wide, so the whole fall of the design drifted out of true. Mr Ashby would notice. He noticed everything that left the Radford sheds, and he liked to say so over his tea.

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She sat with the frame until the lamps were lit, unpicking with a bodkin the length of thread she had spent the afternoon laying down. Her sister's red cotton ran through the work wherever the pattern needed a flush of warmth, on the tips of the wings and along the little bodies of the moths that never quite settled. Beatrice had dyed it herself in a copper pan over the range, swearing the madder would hold. It had held. Nothing else in the room had.

Near midnight the night watchman came by with his lantern and stopped at the window, looking in at the lace stretched like a sail across the frame. He did not say anything. He tapped the glass twice, the way he did when a gate had been left open, and went on.

By morning Hettie had re-pricked the spiral and let the wing fall true again. Ashby came, bent close, and grunted. He held the piece up to the light, and the red threads glowed through the black net like something that had been flying all night and had only just landed.