Black and grey dotwork moth with a sunburst, dotted crosshair lines and a triangle on the inner upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moth and sunburst on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A moth sits at the centre of the design, with its wings shaded using fine dots and short lines. Curved, branch-like shapes curl around its lower wings, and a sunburst of rays sits behind it. Dotted vertical and horizontal lines run through the moth, with a small triangle at the base. The photograph is black and white, showing the arm against a pale wall and a dark sleeve, with another tattoo partly visible at the bottom left.

Dotwork Geometric Upper arm Moth Sunburst Triangle Antler Dotted line Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had sealed the Hollin Pass road by four o'clock, and by nine the only light for three miles was the lamp above the inn's back door. That was how the moth found us, a pale thing as big as my palm, bumping against the glass as if it had walked all the way down from the tops to complain.

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Mrs Aske swore it was a sign of a bad winter. A stag's head hung over the stable door, its antlers gone grey with dust, and she said the moths had come down off the fells every year before the drifts reached the eaves since her husband's time. I told her moths don't read weather. She told me I'd been reading the wrong books. Her grandson had left old survey sheets on the bar, and someone had ruled a dotted cross over the summit, with a small triangle drawn where the surveyor's pillar once stood.

I carried the moth in a tumbler to the table by the map and tipped it out. It settled on the cross as though the lines had been drawn for it, wings spread, its dark body sitting exactly where the dotted lines met. Beyond the window the sky had begun to thin, a brass sunburst lifting over the col, and the moth raised its head toward it the way the whole room had started to.

By morning the road was ploughed. Mrs Aske asked whether I'd let the creature go, and I said I had, at the top of the lane where the wind runs straight over. I did not tell her that I'd pressed my thumb to the summit on the map first, and that the faint grey smudge it left looked very much like a wing.