Black and grey neo-traditional tattoo of a cracked lantern and a death's head hawkmoth on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lantern and death's head moth on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large lantern with a cracked glass panel and a ring handle sits above a smaller death's head hawkmoth with wings spread, both on the forearm. The linework is bold and the shading uses heavy black with soft grey gradients to suggest metal and glass. The image is black and grey on pale skin against a plain grey wall, with the upper body partly visible at the edge of the frame.

Neo-trad Forearm Lantern Moth Skull Glass Crack

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp cracked on the second night out of Valparaíso, and Mr Osei swore the moth had done it. We carried a death's head hawkmoth in the lazarette that year, a fat, furred thing that had come aboard in a crate of mangoes and never found its way back out. Every evening at the change of the watch it drifted up through the hatch and beat itself against the glass of the great brass lantern on the mizzen ring, as though the light owed it something.

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Nobody liked it. The cook crossed himself, the boys called it the Captain's relation, and Captain Pell would not have the lantern moved from its hook even when the glass began to sweat and the oil smoked black. I was the one who went up with a rag and a tin of putty, being the only apprentice who didn't mind the rigging. I found the crack running from the top pane down to the sill, a fine line like a hair caught in frost, and the soot had scraped away beneath it in a shape that looked very like a set of ribs.

On the fourth night the moth came up through the hatch as it always did and settled on the cracked pane, wings spread wide against the flame. I kept still on the ladder and watched its skull-marked back go gold, then black, then gold again as the ship rolled. Nobody else saw it. When I climbed down the watch were singing below and the moth had gone, and the lantern was still warm enough to hold my palm against.

We raised the Needles three days later, grey and sudden out of the rain. Mr Osei carried the lantern ashore himself, wrapped in sailcloth, and never once asked me what I had seen from the ladder.