Black and grey fine line flash design of an eye above a moth inside a triangle, with roses, feathers and a crescent moon, drawn on tracing paper taped to a wall.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Eye, moth and roses within a geometric triangle

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A drawn tattoo design on semi-transparent paper, pinned at the corners to a white wall. A large triangle frames an eye with radiating lines above a moth, with a crescent moon and dotted construction lines below, and feathers and roses hang from the sides and base. The linework is fine and precise, with dotwork and hatching for shading, and the design is shown in black ink and grey tones on a plain background.

Geometric Botanical Fine line Eye Moth Triangle Crescent moon Feather Rose Flower Geometric shape

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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 ledger says the moth came in on a Tuesday, though I was the one who drew it, so I know the ledger lies about small things. Mr Fennick wanted the eye at the top of the triangle, the moth beneath it, and nothing else, but I kept seeing the dotted lines that run down from the apex like rain that has forgotten how to fall. He let me put them in. He said a man who pays for a thing should be allowed one mistake of his own.

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The roses came from the greenhouse behind the chapel, where the widow Hallam grew them in tins of wet sand. She cut the stems for me at dawn and wrapped them in brown paper, and I drew them three times before the petals stopped looking like cabbages. The feathers I took from the pigeon loft at the end of Cutter's Lane, which belonged to nobody since the war, and I pinned each one to the drawing board with a bent nail so it would hold still long enough to be counted.

Fennick came back on the last evening of October with the crescent moon in his coat pocket, a tin disc the size of a half-crown that he had punched himself. He held it against the paper and nodded once. Then he asked me whether the eye was looking at the moth or away from it, and I told him I had never decided, and he said that was the only honest answer anyone had given him in forty years of drawing. We left it unfinished on the bench, the way you leave a door ajar for a draught you can't see.