Black ink traditional flash sheet of butterflies and moths, including a central moth with a woman's face, skulls, tigers and a lantern, on cream paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly and moth flash sheet

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A flash sheet of many butterfly and moth designs arranged in a loose grid on a cream background. The designs use bold black outlines, solid black fills and fine line detailing in wings, with patterns of scales, eyes, skulls and tiger stripes. The sheet is entirely black ink with no colour, and the central design is the largest, with a woman's face framed by the moth's wings.

Traditional Butterfly Moth Skull Tiger Eye Lantern Flash sheet Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamplighter's boy was not supposed to climb the iron ladder after dark, but the moths had come down Tanner Row in a grey drift and settled on the gas lamp at the corner of Cutler Street, and Eli could not bear to watch them go unlit. He had his pole in one hand and his tin lantern hooked on his belt, its face scratched by a hundred winters.

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The woman was already waiting at the top. She stood on the iron rim of the lamp as though it were a step, her cloak made of two great wings banded black and cream, and her face looked out from between them with painted lips and heavy-lidded eyes. Below, the fog lay over the rooftops like a sheet on a line. "The lamps are not yours to keep," she said. "I lend the light and the moths come to it, and when the light goes out, they come for whatever it was guarding." Eli looked down Cutler Street, where a skull of shadow crouched beside the bakery door and a tiger-striped cat padded past the rail yard. "Then what do you want from me?" "Count my eyes," she said.

He counted. There were eleven on her wings and a dozen on the moth beside her, and each one blinked slow as a gaslight dimming. Every time he named a street he had lit that week, a pair of eyes closed and the moth beneath it grew a little brighter. He understood then that the bargain was not his lamplight for her protection, but his attention for her watch. He named every street he could remember until the bells of St Hilda's rang four.

At first light the fog thinned and the moths lifted from the glass one by one, drifting toward the river like a spill of ash. Eli climbed down with cold fingers. The woman had left a single black scale on the rung of the ladder, light as a wing, and he kept it behind his lantern glass ever after. Each night when he lit the corner, he checked that it was still there.