Two black lace-style butterfly tattoo designs on a white background, one with dotted wing panels and one with mesh wing panels, both with dangling dotted chains.

Two lace-winged butterfly designs

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

Two butterfly designs are drawn in black ink on a plain white background, one above the other. Both have intricate lace-like wing patterns with dotted, mesh and scalloped detailing, curled antennae and dotted lines hanging from the lower wings. The linework is bold and even, with no shading or colour, and the two designs are centred and evenly spaced on the page.

Blackwork Geometric Butterfly Lace Chain Antennae

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

The first snowflake of the day lands on the cuff of your coat just below the cairn at Scarrow Pass, and the bundle of bobbin lace in your satchel lifts at its edges as though it wants to leave. Abel Teague, who has carried mail over this pass for thirty winters, told you at the inn not to stop for anything before the shelter stone. You stop anyway. The butterflies have come down off the scree in a pale, unhurried flock, and they settle on your sleeve and the strap of the satchel, folding and unfolding their wings like someone testing a fan.

Keep reading

They are not interested in you. They are interested in the lace. Each wing is stitched in black, with dots where a pricker would have gone and scalloped edges that catch the light the way your mother's pillow work did before her hands went stiff. Four dotted threads hang from each pair of wings, and when one butterfly lifts, its threads swing toward the satchel as if to measure it. You remember the pattern in the bundle. Your mother drew it from the wings of the butterflies that followed her across this pass the winter she was twelve, and she never once let a customer see the original.

You open the satchel and cut a length of the oldest piece with your penknife, a strip no wider than a finger, and lay it on the scree. The flock circles it twice, then settles on it in a single shiver of wings. When you climb on, the snow has stopped, and the valley below is lit a soft gold by the light of Llanwen's chimneys.

At the market you sell the rest of the lace for enough to pay the fare home. Under the stall's canvas, a single unfinished wing stays pinned to the board, its last scallop unworked, and the wind that comes through the gap in the canvas makes its dotted threads sway, as though something is still waiting to be finished.