Neo-traditional tattoo of a blue and yellow moth with a crescent moon on a red geometric circle, across a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moth and crescent moon on a back

Neo-trad · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large moth with outspread wings sits at the centre of the upper back, with a crescent moon above its head and a black triangle at the base of a long dripping line. Behind the moth is a red circular field of overlapping outlined circles. The moth is shaded in teal, blue and yellow with bold dark outlines, while the background uses soft red and orange wash.

Neo-trad Geometric Back Moth Crescent moon Geometric pattern Circle Triangle Drip Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The moth found the lamp on the night the church bell cracked, and by morning half of Fenhithe was swearing it had come to collect what the moon was owed. Mrs Pardoe said so loudest, standing in the chemist's doorway with her shawl pulled over her ears, while Ada Rook went out into the wet with a jam jar and her father's brass dividers in her apron pocket.

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The creature was the size of a hand spread wide, its wings the grey-teal of dyke water under a bruised sky, the edges gone the yellow of old candle wax. A pale crescent hung between its antennae like a hook. She could see the rings of the lamp reflected in its eyes, one inside another, the way the sluice wheels turned. Where its body met the grass, a thin dark line ran down into the mud and pooled, drip by slow drip, toward the triangle she had scratched into the sluice step the week before to mark how far the water had come.

Mrs Pardoe wanted the moon back, she said, for the harvest feast, since it had hung over the orchard all summer and nobody had paid for the light. Ada told her the moth had only borrowed it, and that borrowers always came back to the same field. She opened the jar. The moth did not fly so much as unfold, and the crescent slid from its head and rolled down the bank into the reeds, where it lay glowing like a dropped coin.

In the morning the water had fallen a hand's width at the sluice, and the red haze had gone out of the fields. The crescent was still in the reeds, cold and thin, and Ada pressed it into her father's ledger at the page for the year the dyke broke, so that anyone who opened it would find the moon exactly where the flood had left it.