Black and grey pencil-shaded butterfly design in side view with long antennae, drawn as a realistic tattoo sketch with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pencil-shaded butterfly in side view

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A butterfly is shown in side view with its large forewings raised and a smaller hindwing below, with thin antennae curling up from the head. The wings are outlined in dark graphite with soft grey shading across the veins and panels, giving a rounded, three-dimensional look. The plain pale background leaves the design isolated and centred, with no colour present.

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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

Dear Tamsin, the Royal Naturalist finally let me into the glasshouses at Halverlen, though he made me promise to draw nothing in ink. Ink bleeds into the vellum, and the Crown counts every sheet. So I have been working in graphite, soft and grey, and it has taken me four days to make one butterfly hold still long enough to be seen properly.

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It would not sit flat. Each time I turned my board toward the light, the wings lifted and drifted toward the vents, so in the end I drew it as it was caught, in profile, the forewings raised like a sail that has just decided to leave harbour. The hindwing I shaded from the lower edge upward, pressing lightly so the panels seemed to swell with air. I went over the veins three times. Master Corvin says a drawing that lies flat is a dead thing, and I will not have one of mine dead.

Yesterday the keeper opened the south door and the creature rose and went out over the moat, and I stood there holding my pencil like a fool. Then I understood I had no need of it. I had it on the page, every dark edge and every pale panel within, and nobody could tell me the drawing was less true for having been caught rather than kept.

I am sending the sheet to you by the cart on Thursday, so you can see it before the Crown does. Keep it somewhere dry. Graphite smudges if you breathe on it. Your loving brother, Aldo.

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