Three black butterfly stencil designs on a white background, one at the top and two lower down, with wings filled in by bold solid shapes and open cut-outs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three butterfly stencil designs

Black and grey · Flash

Three butterflies are shown in solid black silhouette on a white background, each with a different angle and wing pattern. The wings use bold black shapes separated by white cut-out areas, with fine detail along the wing edges and veins. The plain monochrome composition places the butterflies at varied sizes across the frame, suggesting a stencil or flash sheet.

Butterfly Stencil Wing Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stencil sheets came aboard at Falmouth in a tin trunk, three butterflies cut from oiled card, and Mr Okonedo the bosun said they were for the paint shop and nothing else. I was sixteen and sweeping the chart room, so I was the one told to keep them dry. Nobody on the Constance Vell was ever told to keep anything dry twice.

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Out past the Azores the galley fire went out for three days in a blow, and the cook, a Glaswegian called Dunphy who spoke mostly to his onions, took to sitting in the paint shop with me. He showed me how to hold the card flat with a thumb and how to dab, never brush, so the ink went through the holes in little speckled puffs. The first wing I stencilled came out on the bulkhead beside the head, black and lopsided, and Dunphy said it looked like it had been in a fight and won.

By the Doldrums we had cut the whole sheet down to almost nothing. The holes were the only part of a butterfly the paint could reach; the black card we left behind just got in the way. Dunphy said that was the whole trick of them, you never drew the wings, you drew the gaps between. I didn't believe him until the wind dropped and a real one, pale and battered, came in through the scuttle and settled on the wall beside my lopsided wing. It sat there a long while, checking the stencil against itself.

When we made Rio the paint was dry and the card was soft as cloth. I kept the middle butterfly, the one with the torn edge, and it still lives in a tin on my shelf. Sometimes I hold it up to a lamp and count the white spaces, because that is where the things that flew actually were.