Black and grey lettering tattooed across the fingers of both hands, with silver moth rings on the middle fingers.

Finger lettering with silver moth rings

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two hands rest on a pale surface, showing black and grey letters tattooed across the fingers, with some letters only partly visible. Two oversized silver moth rings sit on the middle fingers, with fine wing veining and a dark oxidised finish. Soft, even lighting and white stiletto-shaped nails give the image a cool, muted composition.

Lettering Hand Letter Moth Ring Jewellery Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lamp isn't lit yet, and the old wick still remembers the wind. You'll want to hear this before the moths come up the rock, because they always come when the dark's proper.

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Harold Quill kept the light on Skerrin Head for thirty-one winters. He scratched letters into the brass rail of the lantern room, B, G, K, O, N, one for each boat he'd watched pass the point and never once turn for harbour. The mainland thought him soft in the head. Maybe he was. But he kept his log in a tin box on the sill, and every entry ended with the same two words: *still there*.

The moths came in September, pale as lint and big as a child's palm, with dark eyes on their wings that caught the beam and threw it back. Harold swore they were the breath of the drowned, wanting the light to stay on. In his last year he had a jeweller in Thurso cast two of them in silver, the wings veined fine as a leaf, so he could keep them close when the weather turned. He set them in the tin beside the log, and on the foulest nights he'd tap their wings and watch the eyes flash.

When the station was automated, they took Harold ashore and the tin went with him. Nobody asked what was inside. The next September, a fisherman's boy rowed out to the empty rock and found the lantern room thick with moths, hundreds of them, pressed against the dead glass as if waiting for a keeper who'd never come back. He told his mother, who told the lifeboat, and the lifeboat brought the silver ones home again. Now they hang on a hook above the lamp, and the light's never gone out since, though there's nobody left to keep it. Mind the step on your way down. Some of us still count the boats.