Black and grey pencil-style tattoo flash drawing of a lantern with a glowing flame, a moth, leaves and flowers, with dotted linework around the border.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lantern, moth and leaves design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed line drawing of an ornate lantern with a glowing flame and radiating rays, set against sprigs of leaves and small buds. A large moth with shaded wings and a fuzzy body sits across the lower half, and a ring of dots frames the whole composition. The work is rendered in black and grey with fine hatching and stippled shading on a pale background.

Dotwork Botanical Lantern Moth Leaves Flower Flame Dot Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every Saturday the lantern was lit at the top of the barn at Hollin Cross, and every Saturday the moth came in through the gap in the slates before the fiddler had tuned up. Nobody knew whose moth it was. Old Mrs Pask said it had come over the moor with the first harvest dance, when the hall still had a floor of beaten earth and the dancers wrapped their boots in sacking.

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Tam Greave was the only one who ever danced with it. He would stand under the lantern with his hat in his hand and wait for the moth to settle on his sleeve, then he would turn slowly so it did not fly off, and the others would clap him round the floor. The girls said it was foolishness. Still, they made room for him.

The year the roof came down in the storm, they carried the lantern out to the field and set it on a post so the moth could find them. It did not come. Tam walked the lane to the crossroads every night after that, holding the lamp up, until one evening he saw wings settle on the glass and felt a small weight on his knuckle, light as a folded letter.

He carried it back to the hall, and by morning the dancing had started again under the open sky with no roof at all. Mrs Pask said that was the only proper way to keep a moth, and it was the only proper ending anyone ever gave it.