Two matching death's head moth tattoos in traditional style sit on the forearms just below the elbow, with roses tattooed higher on the upper arms.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching death's head moths on forearms

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Two forearms show matching death's head moth tattoos placed just below the elbows, with wings spread and the skull-like markings on the thorax clearly outlined. The moths use bold black linework with grey and brown shading, with some muted red and pink tones. Coloured roses are visible higher up on the arms, and the plain background sits behind the arms.

Traditional Forearm Moth Rose

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer to the stove and mind the kettle, because this one is about two girls who were fools in the same way. The harbour town was Skelder, and in the year the herring went north, the Ardern sisters kept bees on the cliff above the chapel. Every September the big grey moths came up from the southern boats and went after the hives, a pale skull marked on each back like a cracked bone, and their father took a rag to every one he saw.

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Not Bet, though. She sat up nights with a jam jar and a candle, catching them, and carried them down the cliff path to let go on the wind. The summer before she shipped out on the Margaret Joy, the two of them sat on the chapel wall with a sewing needle and a pot of forge soot, and pricked a moth onto each other's forearm just below the elbow. Nell wept the whole time. Bet said it was a promise, which was a daft word for a girl to use with a needle in her hand.

The Margaret Joy came back in March with her hull stove and two men fewer, and Bet was not among the men who walked up to the cottage. What came up the path instead was a jam jar with its lid rusted shut, and inside it a single moth, its wings furred to the grey of old dust. Nell carried it to the wall and unscrewed the lid, and the thing went straight for the hives as they always did, and she let it go.

The bees swarmed that spring in the same place as ever. I have watched the moths go over the chapel roof every September since, skull on their backs, heavy with honey they have stolen from somebody's hive. Nell said they were only hungry, and that a sweet thing carried home is still a sweet thing.