Black ink drawing of a death's-head moth with skull patterns on its wings, set against red geometric lines and a single eye on its body.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Death's-head moth with skulls and red geometry

Dotwork · Mixed · Flash

A symmetrical moth is drawn with its wings spread, each wing showing a skull built from stippled and hatched linework. A single eye sits on the thorax, and red fine lines form overlapping triangles and a hexagon above and behind the insect. The shading is dense and textural in black, with the red linework providing the only colour against a plain cream background.

Dotwork Geometric Moth Skull Eye Geometric line Antennae Hexagon Triangle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Oddie's moth trap hung from the lime tree in the rectory garden, and every August the death's-head moths came to it the way bad news comes to a house, without knocking. Thaddeus had been paid a shilling a night to sit beside the lamp and count them, and he had counted nineteen by the time the church clock struck two. The twentieth was the one that made him put down his pencil.

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It was bigger than the others, its wings spread flat on the sheet like a folded map, and on each wing someone had drawn a skull in the dust. Thaddeus leaned close with the lantern. The skulls were not dust. They were the pattern of the wing itself, hatched and stippled until the bone seemed to swim up out of the velvet. Between the feelers a single eye opened and shut, slow as a lid.

He took up the red ink Mr Oddie kept for marking survey lines and drew the triangles the way he had been taught: three points, a line between them, then a second triangle laid over the first until the two made a six-sided star. When he finished, the moth lifted from the sheet, turned once above the lantern, and flew straight through the hexagon he had drawn on the whitewash.

Mr Oddie never found the moth. He found the wall, though, and a hexagon of rust-coloured lines that would not scrub away, and in the morning the trap was empty and the ledger was blank except for one word in Thaddeus's hand: twenty.