Realistic colour tattoo on the side of a ribcage showing a hawk-moth feeding from orange blossom, with the branch ending in a ball-and-stick molecule.

Hawk-moth and blossom branch on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A hawk-moth feeds from orange blossom on a branch that runs down the side of the ribs and ends in a ball-and-stick molecular structure. The linework is fine and the shading is smooth and realistic, with soft highlights on the flowers and moth wings. Orange, red and brown tones dominate, and the design follows the curve of the torso from the upper left down towards the waistband.

Realism Botanical Ribs Moth Blossom Flower Branch Vine Molecule Chemical structure

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last moth came down the glasshouse corridor at dusk, and you were the only one awake to see it. Its wings were the colour of weak tea, and its proboscis uncurled like a watch spring as it searched the orange blossom on the trellis. Nobody had logged a hawk-moth at Hollin Vale in nineteen years. Dr Oyelaran had insisted the old scent was gone for good and that the synthetic bloom on the new stock would do the job, and you had believed her, mostly, because belief was cheaper than the alternative.

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The moth ignored the protocols. It hovered at a flower the lab had cloned from a single branch found in a salvage crate near the Severn, then moved on to the next, then the next, following a trail of molecules you could not smell. On the sensor board by the door, the compound you had chased for three years turned slowly in its ball-and-stick form, carbon rings and red oxygen nodes spinning like something that wanted to be built. You had drawn that shape a thousand times. You had never once imagined it would matter to something with a face.

No one came to check the logs that night. By morning the moth had dusted every flower it visited with pollen, a bright gold smear on stigmas that had been waiting for it. You photographed the trellis, filed the report under anomaly, and deleted the line that said the bloom needed no pollinator.

Before the shift changed, you propped the glasshouse door open with a brick and left it that way. The branches were already setting fruit.