Black and grey mandala leg sleeve with a moth on each upper thigh, shown from the thighs down to the feet on a dark table.

Mandala leg sleeve with butterflies

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

Two legs are covered in black and grey tattoos, with a moth or butterfly on each upper thigh and mandala medallions running down the thighs, calves and ankles. The linework is fine and the mandalas are shaded with stippled dots and soft grey gradients. The image is taken from above, showing both legs from the thighs to the toes against a dark background.

Dotwork Geometric Thigh Calf Ankle Butterfly Moth Mandala Ornament Floral pattern Leg sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull your stool in close to the range, love, and mind the coal dust on the rug, because the pit never lets go of anything it has once taken. You'll have heard about the moths. Every lamp-room lad in Hollin Drift swore that when the far face came down in the hard winter, the moths came out of the shaft mouth in a grey cloud, thick as sleet, and flew straight for the lamps on the hooks.

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Mind, the lamps had patterns scratched into their glass in those days. Old Mrs Ibbotson's brass-rimmed ones had rings of little flowers set round a centre, and the men said the moths liked those rings best, the way they liked anything that looked like a window with the light still on. Her grandson Walter carried one down the drift every shift, and when the glass clouded he'd stipple it back with a pin, dot after dot, until the rings looked like frost on a pane.

Walter did not come up that February. His mother went down to the lamp-room and found his lamp hung on its hook, still lit, with a moth resting on the rim, wings open, dusted grey and perfectly still. She sat with it all night. By morning there were moths on every ledge of that room, and every one of them faced the same way, toward the shaft, as if they were counting the men who had not yet come home.