Black ink flash design of a death's head moth above an animal skull framed by roses, leaves and a beaded drop pendant, in a blackwork and fine line style.

Death's head moth over a skull and roses

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A death's head moth with a skull marking on its thorax sits above a large animal skull, which is flanked by rose blooms and leaves. Beaded chains with a teardrop pendant hang beneath the skull, and sketched triangular lines radiate from behind the moth. The work uses fine hatched and stippled linework in black ink on a warm sepia background, with no colour.

Blackwork Fine line Moth Skull Rose Leaves Bead Pendant Stipple

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 moth found the bell tower before the brothers did, which Brother Anselm later took as a sign, though he never said of what. You were sent up the ladder with a lantern and a brush to sweep the sills, and there it was, pinned to the lime plaster above the beam: a death's head moth, its furred thorax marked with a skull the colour of old tallow, wings spread as if it had been asked to keep still for a painter.

Keep reading

Below it, in the charnel room, lay the skull of the old ram that had died in the frost of the winter the abbey lost its hay. Brother Anselm kept it as a lesson in mortality and as a hook for his rosary of jet beads, the teardrop bead at the bottom worn milky with handling. You carried the moth down folded in a psalter, past Sister Ottilie's climbing roses, whose last petals were falling onto the flags.

The Prior wanted it killed. A moth like that had once come into the refectory in his father's day, and a novice had taken fever within the week. You said nothing against him. At vespers you opened the psalter over the rose bed, and the moth walked onto your wrist, then climbed across the ram's skull and settled between its hollow eyes as though it had been looking for that exact place all along.

When the bell rang compline the rosary was back on its peg, the teardrop bead warm to the touch. The moth was gone. It had left a fine grey dust on the ram's brow, and you did not wipe it away.