Black linework tattoo design on paper of a symmetrical moth flanked by two beetles, with ornate scrollwork and leaves, suited to a large back or chest piece.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Central moth with beetles and scrollwork

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical design drawn on paper showing a large central moth or cicada-like insect with detailed wings, flanked by a beetle on the left and a second winged insect on the right. Ornate baroque scrollwork, acanthus-style leaves and sprigs of foliage fill the spaces around the insects and frame the composition from above and below. The work is rendered in fine, even black outlines with light hatching and stippled detail on the body segments, with no colour.

Neo-trad Botanical Moth Beetle Insect Scrollwork Leaves Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The beetles came up the valley the same week the pit wheel stopped, and Old Mary Haskins swore they had followed the smoke. Nobody believed her until the men walked home from the stope with their lamps dark and found the hedgerows crawling with black shine and the pale moths hanging from the chapel railings like washing. Ada Pender kept a jar on the windowsill and counted them each morning, because her husband had gone down on the Tuesday shift and had not come up, and counting was the only thing she was allowed to do with her hands.

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The moth that came on the ninth night was bigger than the others. It sat on the sill with its wings spread wide and every vein drawn like a fine crack in glass, and it did not move when she lifted the lamp. Its body was ringed in scales that looked like the segments of a church bell rope. Ada had seen acanthus carved on the choir stalls at St Bride's, and the scrolls ran from its wings down to the sill as if someone had pressed the old stone onto the wood and left it there.

She opened the jar and tipped the beetles out onto the step, one by one, and the moth lifted and followed them down the lane toward the colliery gates. At the gates the ground was soft with rain, and where the men had dug the shaft new scrollwork of roots had broken through the cinder. Ada knelt in the wet and watched her husband's lamp come up out of the dark, swinging, slow, exactly where the moth had settled to rest.