Black and grey moth tattoo with teal accents and bold outlines on the forearm, with a peacock feather tattoo partly visible below.

Moth on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A moth with outspread wings and a striped body sits centred on the forearm, drawn with bold black outlines. The wings are shaded in greys and black with teal highlights along the edges and body. The background shows a grey t-shirt and dark trousers, and a peacock feather tattoo is partly visible at the bottom of the frame.

Traditional Forearm Moth Peacock feather Feather Wing Antennae

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mirror ball at the Winter Palais had lost four of its tiles by the time I started counting them, and I counted them with Dolly Marsh while we leaned on the cloakroom hatch with our shoes off, because the floor had been waxed that afternoon and nobody could stand on it in heels. Dolly was the one who told me about the moths. They came in off the promenade every September, she said, and went straight for the lamp above the bandstand, bumping and bumping until the caretaker knocked them down with a broom and no sense of mercy.

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That night a sailor called Frank Hollis asked her to dance to Stardust. He had a peacock feather tucked into his cap band, brought back from Bombay, and he smelled of Brylcreem and the sea. He dipped her under the lamp and her grey dress flared out like smoke. I saw the moth before she did. It came down in a slow spiral and settled on his sleeve, wings flat and banded with teal at the edges, as if it had chosen the one dancer in the room who would not flinch.

Frank did not shake it off. He held his arm still through the foxtrot, then the waltz, then a second waltz nobody had asked for, and the moth opened and closed its wings as though it were breathing with the band. Dolly said afterwards it was the only thing in the hall that kept perfectly still. When the last song ended, Frank walked her to the door and the moth lifted into the car park and was gone.

The ticket Dolly gave me the next morning had a smudge of teal powder across the number, and I never did ask her which of them she had kept.