Black ink drawing of a symmetrical moth with patterned wings and dotted detailing, shown as a tattoo design on paper.

Black ink moth design

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical moth with spread wings is drawn in solid black ink on cream paper. The wings are filled with scalloped panels, bands of stripes, and rows of small dots, with a central oval body outlined in dotted lines. The vignette around the edges is purple-tinged and the composition sits in the upper half of the frame.

Traditional Moth Insect Wing Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The night the moth came in through the open door of the Pavilion at Ashcombe, the fiddler was halfway through a reel and did not stop. Mary Tennant, who kept the cloakroom, said afterwards that the moth went straight to the lamp above the bandstand as though it had been sent for, and that its wings were patterned like a ledger kept by someone who could not write plainly. Nobody else looked up. The dancers were too busy turning their partners, and the pale oval on its back caught the lamplight like a button someone had lost.

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When the reel ended the moth was still there, folded on the rail beside the piano. Joseph Lane, who had come up from the mill with a bruised hand and no partner, said he would dance with whoever it had come to dance with. He stood in front of it and bowed. The moth lifted, circled once over the floor, and settled on the collar of the girl who had been sitting alone by the urn all evening, a stranger from the Hollins farm whose name nobody had asked.

They danced until the lamps were low. In the morning Mary swept up a scatter of dark dust from the boards and found a single brass pin that had come out of a dress nobody could remember. The stranger was gone, and the moth with her. Joseph kept the pin in his waistcoat for the rest of his life, and on the first warm night of every summer he walked down to the Pavilion, opened the door, and left it open until the lamps burned out.