Four moth designs on a flash sheet

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A flash sheet of four moths arranged in a grid on cream paper, held up by a hand. Two moths have skulls on their bodies and one has a small cross on its abdomen, while the others feature decorative wing panels and eye-spot details. The bold black linework is filled with black and grey shading, and the moths are shown with fanned wings and long antennae.

Traditional Moth Skull Cross Flash sheet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sunday, 14th October. Carrow Junction, night turn. The lamp in the signal box has been pulling moths all week, and tonight there are more of them than I have seen since the summer old Harker retired. Big ones, with a pale skull pressed into the furred back of the thorax like someone had leant a thumb in the dust. Mrs Pryce from the level crossing says they are dead men's moths and that they can squeeze under a door through a gap no wider than a letter. She says they hum to the bees to keep them quiet. I told her bees don't hum to anybody. She said nobody had asked the bees.

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At half past two the Carlisle goods came through without stopping, and I had the lamp turned low so the drivers wouldn't mistake the glass for a green. One settled on the lever frame, wings opened flat like a county map, feelers working at the brass as if it were reading. I didn't brush it off. Harker always said you let the things that come in out of the dark finish their business before you show them the door.

I went down to the platform with the tea at three and found the signal lamp had gone out in the wind. The moth was still on the frame when I came back up, and so was the one with the small cross marked on its belly, and between them they had the whole box to themselves. I relit the wick with a match and stood there a while watching the flame take.

At six the first milk train rattled past and the moths lifted together, all at once, and went into the grey toward the embankment. I wrote the count in the book the way Harker taught me: forty-one on, one out, none lost. Then I put the kettle on for the day man.