Traditional-style black moth tattoo across the stomach, with a colour clock face tattoo with Roman numerals on the thigh.

Moth on stomach and clock on thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A person lies on a bed in a cropped top, flannel shirt and denim shorts, showing a large black moth tattoo across the stomach. The moth has bold solid black wings with grey shading and white highlights. A colour clock tattoo with Roman numerals and a green leaf sits on the upper thigh, and the photo is taken from above in soft natural light.

Traditional Thigh Other Moth Clock Roman numeral Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The night the moths came to the orchard, Hedda Marsh had already lost two pickers to the rain and one to a bad temper. She stood on the ladder in the last of the August light, shaking a Bramley branch, and watched the windfalls rot in the long grass where nobody would gather them. Her father's clock sat on the kitchen windowsill, stopped at twenty past four since the spring, because he had said a clock in an orchard ought to know when to rest.

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The moths arrived at dusk, big as a child's hand, their wings dark and banded like old slate. They settled on the trunks of the Discovery trees and on the sacking Hedda had hung to dry, and they did not fly when she clapped. Her neighbour Joan came over the stile with a lantern and said the old people used to call them death's-head moths, and that you did not sweep them off, because they only came for fruit that had already decided to fall.

Hedda thought about that while she wound the clock that night, the brass key cold in her fingers. In the morning she walked the rows and left the bruised apples where they lay, and by the second week the moths had thinned to a handful, folding their wings like hands at prayer on the bark. The clock ticked again when she finally took the pendulum in her palm and let it go. She sold the rest of the crop by the bushel and kept one moth, pinned flat, in the drawer with the seed packets.