Two black and grey butterfly tattoos with lace-like wings sit on a woman's abdomen, one beside the navel and one lower down, above black shorts.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two lace-winged butterflies on the abdomen

Other · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows a close crop of a woman's torso in a black bra and black shorts. Two butterflies with ornate, lace-like wing patterns are tattooed on the abdomen, one above and to the right of the navel and one lower down. The linework is fine and detailed, with grey shading filling the wings. The background is pale and plain, keeping the focus on the tattoos.

Other Butterfly Lace pattern Wing Abdomen

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down on that wall, love, it's warm yet, and mind the lavender. You'll not hear the end of this standing up. My grandmother used to say the lace-winged butterflies came out of the Pennick garden the summer the bobbin-woman lost her thread. She was a lacemaker, Hester Pennick, and she sat each evening at the pillow by the south gate, pins in a row like teeth, making collars for the vicar's wife.

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One evening a butterfly landed on the pillow and sat very still, watching the bobbins turn. Hester thought it was after the thread, so she let it be. Every night after that it came back, and every night it sat a little closer, until one night she saw its wings were the very pattern she had been pricking out all summer, holes and loops and little knots, as fine as anything in her cabinet.

Now here is the trick of it. Hester was a proud woman and she wanted that pattern for herself. So she waited until the butterfly slept, pinched it gently, and pressed its wings flat between two sheets of linen. Come morning the pattern was hers, but the butterfly had gone quiet, and the garden went quiet with it. The roses would not open. Her thread snapped every hour.

She sat up three nights with the lace in her lap, and on the fourth she carried it out to the gate and unpicked every knot. What rose up off that linen was not one butterfly at all but two, and they flew over the wall without a backward look. Mind, they came back the next spring, and they still do, and they still sit where the sun is kind.