Cameo, moth and flowers on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The left panel shows a moth above a scalloped cameo portrait of a woman in profile, with a dark-leafed flower sprig at the sides and a flower below. The right panel shows a solid black band with dotted rule lines, containing a row of rosette-style flowers around the wrist. Shading is smooth and the linework is bold, with no colour ink used.

Traditional Forearm Moth Cameo Flower Rosette Butterfly

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp had been dark since Tuesday, and by the time Ilse Carrow climbed the wet steps to the toll house at Hollin Pass, the moths had already found the window. They pressed against the cold glass in a grey, patient crowd, each one marked with a pair of pale eyes on its wings, as if the whole valley below had been looking up at her for days.

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Her grandmother had worn a brass cameo at the throat, a woman in profile with a scalloped frame and a curl of hair pinned behind one ear. It had gone to the bank in the bad winter, the year the plough broke and the road closed for eleven weeks. Ilse still knew its weight by heart. She had never been able to say whether she missed the face or the frame.

She cleaned the chimney with newspaper and a wire brush, trimmed the wick, and filled the reservoir from a can that had frozen and thawed twice. Along the wall, the wheel-shaped asters pushed up through the stones, each one a neat ring of petals. She had threaded their dried heads onto string the summer she was nine, between two lines of dots, the way her mother had taught her to mark the gate tallies. Nobody had asked her to keep the count. She kept it anyway.

Around nine, headlamps came grinding up through the fog, a lorry with its chains rattling. The driver stopped beneath the window and leaned out, squinting at the dark glass. Ilse struck the match, and the flame caught with a soft pop. The moths lifted off all at once and drifted down the road ahead of the lorry, as though they had been waiting to lead it home. She left the window open a crack after the driver had gone, so the next one could find her.