Black linework drawing of a stylised butterfly with curling scroll wings and a slim body on a white background, shown as a tattoo design without a body placement.

Swirling butterfly tattoo design

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a line drawing of a stylised butterfly with a slender, tapering body and a small curled head at the top. Its wings are built from sweeping lines that end in spirals and small hooked flourishes. The drawing is rendered in black ink on a plain white background, with even, unshaded linework and a symmetrical composition.

Butterfly Wing Swirl Scroll Spiral

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

Mrs Pruett kept the tin of buttons on the kitchen windowsill, and whenever a child came in crying she would tip them out across the oilcloth and say the grey ones were for crying and the bright ones for everything else. That was the spring the Hallam boy went missing up past the quarry, and the whole of Tadcaster Lane was out with lanterns, and nobody thought to look in her shed. Her shed had a moth in it. A big pale creature the size of a dinner plate, pinned to the back wall, that she had brought home from the fair in a cardboard box and never once let anyone touch.

Keep reading

When the lanterns came back at midnight without him, Mrs Pruett went out to the shed with a candle and stood there a long while. Then she lifted the pin from the moth and carried it out into the lane, and it did not fly so much as unfold, the way a dropped ribbon opens on the wind. It went up over the chimney pots in long curling loops, spiralling and doubling back on itself until the men at the top of the quarry road stopped shouting and simply stared.

They found the boy asleep in a dry culvert, curled up against the cold with his cap pulled over his face. He said a lady in a dark dress had walked him down by the hand, though the only lady in Tadcaster Lane was Mrs Pruett, and she was at home with her buttons, sorting the grey from the bright. Nobody ever asked her about it. The moth was never seen again, but on still mornings, if you stood at her gate, you could see faint curls of silver on the frost of the quarry wall, as neat as the tails of a letter nobody had finished writing.