Six solid black butterfly designs in a blackwork style with detailed wing patterns, arranged in two rows on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Six black butterfly designs

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows six butterfly designs arranged in two rows of three on a plain white background. Each butterfly is drawn as a solid black silhouette with white cut-out patterns, scalloped edges and fine interior veining. The designs vary in wing shape and angle, and the image is entirely black and white.

Blackwork Butterfly Wing Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The abbot wanted six butterflies for the chapter house screen by Easter, and Brother Oswin gave the job to me because my hands were steadier than his since the fever. I sat at the long bench with a sheet of black card, a bradawl and the little steel knife the infirmarian used for splinters, and I learned quickly that a wing is mostly the spaces you leave out.

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Each one had to be cut in a single piece so the veins stayed joined to the margin. Oswin's rule was that no wing could be lighter than the one beside it. I made the first three by candlelight, pricking the scallops with a needle so the edges would look like lace. The fourth tore at a vein, and I sat staring at it until the bell for Compline, thinking of the old pear tree behind the wash-house, where we used to hang cut paper for the children to pick at.

On the feast of St Brendan the sun came through the screen and threw all six shadows across the flagstones, and the novices lined up to look. Oswin said nothing. He lifted the torn one from the bench, turned it to the light, and set it at the very top of the row, where the wing was most ragged. "Nothing here should be whole," he said, "or nobody would know it was flying."

That night I cut a seventh from the offcuts, small and crooked, and pinned it beneath the window ledge where only the sexton would find it. In the morning it had gone, and I never learned whether the wind took it or a bird.