Black and grey drawing of a death's-head moth with a skull on its thorax and striped wings, shown as a flash design on paper with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Death's-head moth with skull design

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil and ink style drawing of a death's-head moth, with a shaded human skull forming its head and thorax and feathered antennae above. The striped wings are rendered with bold black bands and fine hatched lines, giving a traditional flash look. A partial second skull and wing appear at the top left corner, and the design sits on a plain pale background.

Traditional Moth Skull Antennae Wing

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 lamp at Scarrow Point had not been lit in eleven nights because the oil had turned to tar, and Mabel Fenn said the moths knew it. They came up the cliff path in the dusk, the big grey ones with the stripes like ship's timbers, and they settled on the glass where the light should have been. Her brother Tom swept them off with a broom every morning and every morning they were back by teatime, folding their wings flat against the glass as if they were reading.

Keep reading

On the twelfth night a fishing smack came in under no sail at all, drifting onto the shingle with its lamp dead and nobody at the tiller. Mabel went down with the storm lantern. In the bottom boards lay a man's oilskin and a tin cup, and on the cup someone had scratched a little skull with a moth beneath it, the wings drawn in fine lines that caught the lantern light. Tom said it was a sailor's mark for a drowned crew. Mabel said it was the mark of a woman who had sat on that rock with a pencil and a bottle of ink, waiting for a boat to come home.

They filled the lamp that night with the last clean oil in the house and lit it at midnight. In the morning the glass was bare. Along the shore, where the tide had pulled back, there was a line of moths laid out on the wet sand, every one of them facing the sea, and not one had been swept away by the wind.