Black line drawing of a butterfly with curling scrolls filling its wings, shown as a tattoo design on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Scrollwork butterfly tattoo design

Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical butterfly with long, sweeping antennae and a slim body, drawn in bold black outline. Each wing is filled with spiral scrolls that curl inward, and the lower wings taper into long tails. The design is flat black on a plain white background, with no shading or colour.

Butterfly Scroll Swirl Antennae Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp at Scarrow Point had not been tended by a proper keeper since the herring boats stopped coming in, so when a pane of glass worked loose in the gallery that March, it was me who climbed the iron stairs with a bucket of linseed and my father's old spanners. Mum said I would fall. I told her the sea had no interest in whether I fell, which was true, and she let me go.

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On the third morning a butterfly was sitting on the rail outside the lantern room. It was black and nothing else, its wings cut open and filled with curls, as though someone had tried to write the wind down on paper and given up halfway. Its antennae were long and fine as hair, and it sat so still I took it for part of the ironwork until it lifted into the wind off the Firth and its two long tails trailed behind it like the ends of a ribbon.

It came back every morning after that. I started leaving the crack in the gallery window propped open with a wedge of driftwood, and I would find it waiting on the sill, turning its spirals slowly in the damp air as if reading the weather. I told nobody. Mum found the wedge and asked what it was for, and I said it was for the butterfly, and she laughed until she had to sit down on the step.

The glass was finished in April. On the last evening I climbed up to test the new pane and saw the lamp swing its beam across the water, and the shadow of the black wings lay flat across the rocks below, curling and uncurling as if the whole coast were being written out in one long hand.