Black ornamental butterfly design made of swirling scrolls, dots and small flowers on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate swirl butterfly design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical butterfly with outstretched wings, built from curling scrolls, dotted lines, small five-petal flowers and leaf-like teardrop shapes. The linework is bold and mostly solid black with fine decorative detail inside the wing panels. It is drawn in black ink on a plain white background with no colour.

Botanical Butterfly Flower Swirl Scroll Dot Leaves Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, and mind the wasps, they've been at the windfalls since breakfast. This is the tale of Maddie Ruddock and the butterfly that would not leave the old Pearmain tree at the bottom of Hollin's orchard. It was the end of August, the year the apples came early and the grass went the colour of a biscuit, and Maddie was fourteen and furious about everything.

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Her mother took in bobbin lace for the ladies in the market town, and Maddie had been made to sit at the cushion every evening, pinning and twisting threads until her fingers ached. That morning a butterfly came down onto the lace pinned to the washing line. Its wings were like a fancy ironwork gate, all scrolls and curls, with little dots marching along the edges and tiny five-petalled flowers scattered over the black. Maddie reached out to catch it, and it folded its wings and waited, patient as a cat, while she copied every curl onto the pattern card with a stub of charcoal.

She worked the pattern through the afternoon, one loop and one dot at a time, and when the lamps came on her mother found a lace butterfly lying on the cushion, so fine it stirred when the door opened. Her mother did not praise her. She only folded it in tissue and carried it out to the orchard, where the sun was going red over the trees. The real butterfly came back, settled on the edge of the tissue, and lifted off towards the Pearmain, leaving a dark shadow of scrolls on the grass.

The next morning the lace was gone from the basket, and a fat windfall lay in the grass with its own ring of wasp-holes. Maddie's mother sold the cloth at Michaelmas to a man with a silver watch who asked for the one with the dotted wings. Maddie still keeps the pattern card. If you look under the Pearmain on a day like this, you'll see wings going up and down in the shade, and you'll know she is counting every curl.