Black and grey flash design of a rib cage, rose, dagger, skull and butterfly with banners reading Can we create something beautiful and destroy it, in traditional style with dotwork shading.

Rib cage, skull and butterfly with banner text

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a rib cage beside a rose and a dagger, with a skull and a butterfly at the lower half and two banners carrying the lettering. The linework is bold and clean, with stippled dotwork shading on the skull, butterfly wings and rib cage. The design is in black ink on a pale grey background, centred on the sheet.

Traditional Dotwork Rose Dagger Skull Butterfly Banner Lettering

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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

Every October the fair at Harrowgate asked Mary Tully for something beautiful, and every November she took her hammer to it. Nobody in the village could say when the habit began. Her father thought it was grief, and the vicar called it pride, but Mary only said a thing was finished once it had been broken, and she could not bear to keep something that was still waiting to fall.

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That year the fair wanted a glass butterfly for the church porch, blown thin as breath, its wings dusted with powdered gold. Mary worked three weeks at the furnace behind the chandler's shop. When it cooled she set it on the sill of her bedroom and sat across from it with the dagger her grandfather had used to cut harness leather, and she did not lift the blade.

The lamplighter, old Abel Quince, climbed the stairs that night with a cough and a lantern. He looked at the butterfly for a long time. "Your grandfather made a rose once," he said, "and buried it under the ribs of the old wreck on the quay, so there'd be something left when the sea came up." He touched the sill with one finger. "Some things keep because nobody is allowed to break them."

Mary left the butterfly where it stood. The butterfly stayed on her sill through that winter and the next, its gold going dull in the lamplight, and the dagger hung on its nail by the door where she could see it every morning.