Black and grey death's head hawkmoth tattoo on the open palm, with a small cross on the wrist and a coffee cup beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Death's head hawkmoth on the palm

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand is held palm up towards the camera, showing a detailed death's head hawkmoth tattooed across the palm in black ink. The moth has bold outlines with fine hatching and shading on its wings and body, and a small cross is tattooed lower down near the wrist. A cigarette is held between the fingers, and a white cup and saucer of coffee sits in the background against a light, slightly overexposed backdrop.

Hand Moth Cross Coffee Cigarette

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hive-warden of Maren Vale had kept bees for thirty winters, and in all that time nobody had ever seen the moths come out in daylight. So when Tobiah Quell found one folded against the lid of the third hive at noon, its wings patterned like a funeral shroud, he set down his tea and did not reach for the smoke pot.

Keep reading

The moth was a death's head, the kind the old almanacs said crept up from the marshes of Ostry whenever the king's tithe grew heavy. On its back the pale skull sat grinning over the thorax, and when he lifted the lid it gave a thin squeak, like a cart wheel in frost. The bees did not sting it. They only stood aside, the way villagers stood aside for the tithe-clerk.

He had been told the story about the honey since boyhood: the moth slipped into a hive, ate through the store and drank until the colony starved. His father had sworn it was the cross scratched above the door that kept them away, a mark cut by a dead woman's hand. Tobiah had never believed in the cross. He believed in the wax, which was thinning.

He took the moth between two fingers, meaning to carry it down to the river, but it walked onto his palm as if it knew the road. He sat in the sunlit yard with a cigarette going cold between his knuckles and watched it drink from the little pool of honey he had spilt. When he finally stood, the moth lifted without fuss and crossed the yard toward the chapel, and he let it go, because some debts in Maren Vale were paid to the dead and not to the king.