Black tribal-style butterfly design with swirling wings and curled antennae on a plain white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal butterfly design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A solid black butterfly drawn with bold, flowing tribal-style linework. The wings are split into curving panels and scrolls, with a narrow body and two curled antennae at the top. The design is shown flat on a white background with no skin or shading visible.

Blackwork Butterfly Tribal Swirl Antennae Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gate had to be finished before the frost, Mr Halloran said, because the widow Vane would not pay for a gate that rusted before it was hung. I was nineteen and had been at the forge since I could lift the tongs, so I did not argue. I bent the scrolls cold and heated them red again, working each wing from a pattern my master had drawn on the back of a rent ledger: a long curving panel, a spiral at its foot, and two thin feelers curled at the top like the ends of a fern.

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Widow Vane's garden wall had cracked in the storm of the year before, and beyond it stood the old castle, nothing now but a shell of grey stone with ivy growing through the arrow slits. Nobody went up there. But the gate would open onto the path that led to it, so each evening I walked out to fit the hinges and stood in the wind looking at the tower, where a banner pole still jutted from the battlements like a bone.

On the last night the iron was black and cooling when I found a scrap of paper folded inside the pattern ledger. It was older than Halloran's hand, with the same butterfly drawn in pencil and a name beneath it that was not mine. The name was Maud. Beside it, written in a hurry, were the words keep the wings open so the wind goes through. I hung the gate with the wings spread wide and left the latch unlocked. In the morning the frost had painted every scroll white, and the butterfly stood open over the path as if it had only just landed.