Fine line and dotwork tattoo of a moon, an outlined moth and a small sprig on the upper arm, with a coloured flower tattoo partly visible above.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moon, moth and sprig on the arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

Three small motifs sit on the inner arm: a sprig of leaves on the left, a dotwork-shaded full moon in the centre and an outlined moth below. The linework is thin and light, and the moon is built from stippled dots to suggest shading. The ink is black, with a partly visible coloured flower tattoo at the top edge of the frame against a plain wall and a rust-coloured top.

Fine line Dotwork Botanical Upper arm Moon Moth Sprig Leaves Flower Wildflower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The night before her wedding, Anne Dyer could not sleep, so she went out to the wall at the bottom of the orchard and sat with her bare feet in the wet grass. The moon hung low over the fen, full and pocked like a bannock left too long on the griddle. She asked it what she should do about Tom Harrow, who was kind but slow to laugh, and the moon said nothing, as moons do, though it seemed to brighten a little when she talked.

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A moth came down out of the dark and settled on the wall beside her. It was grey-brown with pale edges to its wings, and it had a sprig of wild clematis caught in its feet, the leaves still curled from the frost. "That's my mother's hedge," Anne said. The moth dropped the sprig into her lap and waited, which was how she knew it wanted something back. So she told it the truth: she did not love Tom. She loved the sound of the mill wheel in the river and the way the fen went silver at dusk, and she was afraid of becoming a wife with no road of her own.

The moth rose up at the moon and circled it three times. Each time it passed, the moon grew a little thinner, as if its light were being carried off on small wings. By the third circle the sky was black and the reeds had gone to nothing. Anne could hardly see the moth at all. Then it landed on her wrist, and she heard the mill wheel turning, though the mill had stood still for years.

In the morning Tom waited at the chapel gate with his hat in his hands. Anne walked past him onto the mill road with the sprig tucked behind her ear, and the moon, pale and small, kept her company as far as the river. Nobody in Hallow Fen saw her again, though the miller's wife said that on windless nights a grey moth came to the chapel window and tapped at the glass, as if it were still asking.