Recently, artificial perforated auxetic meta‐structures with negative Poisson’s ratio (NPR) have attracted considerable attention with the superior mechanical properties. The concepts and design methods of various types of perforated auxetic meta‐structures have developed rapidly. However, the effective Poisson’s ratio exhibited by the majority of current perforated auxetic meta‐structures has a lower limit of ‐1, which restrains their potential applications significantly. In this paper, a novel two‐dimensional perforated auxetic meta‐structure was proposed by arraying orthogonal barbell‐shaped holes onto a sheet structure. The mechanical properties and the underlying deformation mechanism of the proposed auxetic meta‐structure were then investigated by performing experimental tests and finite element (FE) simulations. Results show that the lower limit of the Poisson’s ratio exhibited by the proposed auxetic meta‐structure surpasses ‐1 remarkably and the proposed design hence exhibits much better auxetic performance compared with existing designs. It is also revealed that the proposed design exhibits relatively low local stress distribution. The results of this study will broaden the potential applications of perforated auxetic meta‐structures in many engineering fields.This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.