Black and grey blackwork tattoo of a moth inside a solid black circle and a botanical branch design with a pinecone on the forearm near the elbow.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moth in a black circle and branches on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm near the elbow carries a black and grey tattoo. A solid black circle holds a moth with fine hatched wings, while above it a cluster of bare branches, a pinecone and other natural details spreads across the skin in dense linework. The arm is shown against pale, silvery foliage outdoors, and the image is sharply lit.

Blackwork Botanical Forearm Moth Branches Foliage Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Take the lantern off the hook, Ada, and keep your eyes on the path, not the sky. Three hours over Harrow Saddle if the wind holds, and the wind never holds up there.

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Old Tom Bracken crossed that saddle with salt on his back for forty winters, and every one of them a pale moth came out of the dark to sit on his lamp. Not a common moth. Its wings were the grey of wet slate, and on each one sat a single eye, ringed in black, that seemed to watch the track ahead. The shepherds said it was a soul that couldn't settle. Tom said it was just hungry for warmth. He never argued the point, because the moth always brought him through.

The winter he was sixty-one, the snow came early and thick, and the track vanished under the silver-leaved thistles that grew along the ridge like frost that had forgotten how to melt. Tom lost the path. He sat down in a hollow with his lamp guttering, and the moth came down and settled on a dead larch branch above him, beside a pinecone wedged in the crook like a little brown fist. It stayed there, wings open, while the lamp burned low.

When the cloud lifted at first light, Tom saw the cairn was twenty paces to his left. He walked to it and set his salt down. On the stones lay the pinecone the moth had sat beside, and he never found out who had put it there, or whether the moth had carried it up from the valley. He left one on the cairn every crossing after that, and the moth still came down to rest on it, wings spread like a door left open for the one who was still coming.