Black linework drawing of a stylised butterfly with swirling wings and curled antennae on a peach background, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swirling butterfly line design

Black and grey · Flash

A bold black outline drawing of a stylised butterfly in flowing, tribal-influenced lines, with pointed upper wings, a curled lower tail and spiralled antennae. The ink is solid black with no shading, set against a plain peach background in a simple, centred composition.

Butterfly Swirl Wing Antennae Outline

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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

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the lamp, because this is the part where the wind comes off the salt flats and tries to take the words out of my mouth. Nobody living has seen a butterfly. The last of them went up the old dome vents the year the rivers turned black, and all we have now are the pictures people scratched onto walls before the walls were ours to keep.

Keep reading

Ada Wren was a cistern-mender in Low Quarter, and she had a habit of drawing in the grit on the pump-house floor with a burnt stick when she thought no one was watching. One wet evening she drew a shape with two pointed wings, a tail that curled back on itself like a fern unrolling, and a pair of long feelers ending in little knots. She could not say why her stick wanted that shape. She only knew it felt like a door someone had painted shut.

She carried the grit-drawing to old Morrow, who kept the sealed tins. He read it upside down, then right way up, and said the feelers were the important part, because a thing that tastes the air ahead of itself knows where it is going. Then he looked at her for a long while and told her to go and find the vent.

The vent was still breathing when she reached it, a cold draught smelling of rust and rain. She pressed her palm to the grille, and the draught bent around her fingers in a slow, looping curl, as if something on the other side had been waiting for someone to notice it was still there.