Traditional style colour tattoo of a death's head hawkmoth with a skull marking on the upper thigh, set against a red circle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Death's head hawkmoth on thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A death's head hawkmoth with spread wings and a skull on its thorax is shown in bold outlines. Yellow, orange and brown shading fills the body and wings, with white and grey highlights on the skull and dark speckled detail on the wing patterns. A solid red circle sits behind the moth, and the tattoo is centred on the upper thigh against plain skin.

Traditional Thigh Moth Skull Sun Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The moths came up the pass the week the snow shut the road, which is how my father knew the year was turning bad. Death's heads, he called them, though nobody in the hut liked the word said after dark. They gathered at the lamp above the door as the sun slid behind the col and turned the scree the colour of rust. They clung to the whitewashed wall with their wings folded like shutters, the skull on each back grinning down at us over the bread.

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Mother said they carried the last breath of the dead over the mountains to the valley towns, so we kept the lamp lit and never shut the door on them. A carter called Anselm came through that November with two mules and a cough, and he paid for his bed with a silver pocket watch he said had belonged to a man on the far side of the ridge. He would not wind it. He sat by the stove listening for a tick that never came, and each evening a moth settled on the glass and stayed there, wings spread, while the red light from the sunset spilled across the face.

On the last morning the pass was clear and blue, and Anselm was gone before dawn, leaving the mules and the watch on the table. I ran after him down the zigzag with the watch in my fist. Halfway down I saw him below me, small as a pin, walking towards the sun that was just breaking over the far peaks. I wound the watch and it ran. When I looked back, the windowsill was empty, and a moth rose from it and went after him into the light.