Copper-coloured fine line drawing of a symmetrical moth with sunburst and zigzag wing patterns and an eye at its centre, on a dark brown background.

Copper line moth with geometric wings

Fine line · Colour · Flash

A symmetrical moth with spread wings is drawn in thin copper-coloured lines on a dark brown textured background. The wings hold circular sunburst motifs, zigzag bands and a star-like emblem, while the body carries a central eye and a column of linked circles. The composition is centred with the planetary-style symbol above the head, and the metallic line work is even and precise throughout.

Fine line Geometric Moth Eye Sunburst Zigzag Circle Star Geometric pattern Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Pym had been assured no moth would stir in November, yet at a quarter to three one sat on the brass rim of the lamp housing, its wings spread flat as a sundial's gnomon. She had counted the sunbursts on them twice while she waited for Mercury to ease onto the solar disc. Uncle Silas's handwriting filled the ledger beside her, every earlier transit timed in his cramped hand, and he had told her to mind the chronometer and not to look at the moth.

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The bead of Mercury touched the limb at 2:47 by the chronometer, exactly as the tables promised. She wrote it down. The moth lifted, circled the eyepiece once, and settled over the glass where the glare made its outline seem to burn. Its body carried a single round eye above a column of rings, like the beads of a rosary, and she found she was counting those too.

At contact the wind dropped off the dome and the whole building went silent. Ada pressed her thumb to the key and held it. The moth opened its wings, and for a moment the light through the shutter caught the copper lines so they glowed like wire heated for soldering. The eye, she thought, was watching the table rather than the sky.

When she logged the second contact at 5:19 the moth had gone. Silas read her figures the next morning and grunted, then turned the ledger so she could see his own entry from forty years before: the same minute, the same figures, and a small pencil moth in the margin. Ada left it there and wrote nothing beside it.