Black ink dotwork drawing of a butterfly with open wings on a cream background, shown as a tattoo design rather than on skin.

Stippled butterfly design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A butterfly with fully spread wings is drawn in black ink, with the wing outlines, veins and spots built up from fine stipple dots. The body is a dense column of dots at the centre, and the wings shade darker towards their edges, leaving the middle of each wing lighter. The drawing is in black and grey only and sits centred on a plain cream paper background.

Dotwork Butterfly Wing Insect

Find an artist for this

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

The drone that should have photographed the last monarchs came back with its lens fogged, so the Ministry of Seeds asked you to draw them instead. You set up at the bench in the hydroponic bay of the Sorrel Reach, where the air smells of wet basil and warm copper. You start at the forewing edge because that is where the eye goes first, and you press the nib down dot by dot until the outline holds.

Keep reading

Dots take time. Okonedo, who keeps the ledger, says the old plates needed close to half a million to a wing, and she counts your progress each evening with a stylus against the glass. The body is the hardest part, a dense column you build from the head down like a pillar of salt. Beyond the viewport the lamps of the ring turn slowly. Each morning someone leaves a cup of tea gone cold beside your hand, with a pencil note asking whether you have reached the spots yet.

On the forty-first day the drone's lens clears and the real photographs arrive, grainy and bright, from a valley below where the wild milkweed still grows. You lay them beside the sheet. Your drawing is darker at the edges than the living wing and paler at its heart, which is how you remember them rising off the fence at the old farm, before the seal, before the ring. You had not meant to make it that way. You had only been careful with the middle.

Okonedo reads the count and says the numbers are wrong. You tell her you left some out on purpose. You pin the sheet above the seed bank, where the lamps reach it, and in the margin you write nothing at all. Someone will count the dots one day and get a different total, and you hope they enjoy the argument.