Realistic drawing of a butterfly whose wings are human skulls, shaded in sepia and brown tones on a beige background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull-winged butterfly design

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A butterfly is drawn with its two upper wings formed from skull shapes, with the body and head of the insect forming the centre of a larger skull face. The linework is fine and the shading is soft and realistic, with brown and tan tones and dark accents along the antennae and body. The design is centred on a plain beige background with even margins on all sides.

Realism Butterfly Skull Wing Insect Bone

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crate from Port Mahon had been nailed shut so long that the wood sweated camphor, and Ada Lunt had to work it open with a bradawl while Mr Sayer hovered at her shoulder asking whether the specimens had survived the sea. They had, mostly. Dozens of hawkmoths lay in folds of tissue paper, their furred bodies gone the colour of weak tea. Ada lifted the last one to the lamp and stopped.

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Its upper wings were not wings in the ordinary sense. The pale ridges across them curved and hollowed into the shapes of a brow and two dark sockets, and the lower wings bore the rest of a jaw, all of it set in the sleek tan of old ivory. She had pinned a thousand moths. She had never pinned one that looked back at her.

Sayer wanted it sold on by Friday to a man in Clifton who bought curiosities and asked no questions about where they came from. Ada agreed, then went home and laid the moth on a card beside her bedroom window, wings spread as she had been taught. In the morning the church clock across the street struck seven, and the light fell through the glass so that the skull lay exactly over the shadow of the steeple. She told herself it was only the angle. She wrote the name on the label in her own hand, not Sayer's, and slid it into the bottom drawer, where no one would think to look for it.