Solid black traditional tattoo of a moth with eye motifs and rays covering the back of a hand and parts of the fingers.

Moth and eyes across the back of a hand

Traditional · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A moth sits centrally on the back of the hand, flanked by eye motifs and fanned radiating lines that extend towards the knuckles. The work is mostly solid black fill with fine hatched and linear detail, and the skin of the fingers is largely blacked in with some untattooed areas showing between them. The image is entirely black and grey, shot against a plain light background with the hand held forward.

Traditional Blackwork Hand Moth Eye Ray Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The snow shut the pass on Tuesday and nobody has come up the valley road since, so I have the inn to myself with Mrs Pryce's cat and a moth that will not leave the back parlour. I told you about the moth in my last letter and you laughed, but it is still here. It sits on the wall above the settle with its wings spread flat, and when the lamp is lit it turns so that the two round marks on each wing face the room. Mrs Pryce says they are eyes. She says a moth that comes in during a hard winter is watching for who will not see the spring.

I have been trying to ignore it, which is harder than you would think when the thing has a face. Last night I banked the fire and went up to bed, and when I came down at dawn the moth had moved to the sill and the frost had drawn a pale line along the glass, as if someone had traced the fans of its wings there. The cat was sat right beneath it, not hunting, just looking up.

Then the drift at the gate broke open at noon and a carter came up with bread and the post. He stood in the doorway with his cap in his hands and asked, very politely, whether we had kept the parlour lamp lit all week. I said we had. He nodded as if he expected that. He said his father used to tell him the moths that come in off the snow are only ever counting the lamps, and that a house with its light still going is a house they will not bother.

I have left the lamp burning. Write soon, and tell me the road is clear.

Yours, Ned