Traditional black and grey moth tattoo across the back of a hand, with a feather tattoo on the wrist and letters on the fingers.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moth on the back of a hand

Traditional · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A large moth with spread wings, detailed with eye-like markings and scalloped bands, is tattooed across the back of a hand. A feather runs down from the top of the wrist, and small letters and a heart appear on the fingers. The linework is bold and the shading is in black and grey, set against pale skin with a reddish flush.

Traditional Hand Moth Feather Heart Letter Wing

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The moth had been circling the gas lamp outside Varley's pawnshop since the rain stopped, and by midnight it had found the ledger. Nell Varley lifted the cover to find it resting on the last written page, wings open like a pair of theatre programmes, each spot on them a painted eye that seemed to follow her pen.

Keep reading

Her father had always said a moth that came in after dark was carrying someone else's debt, and that the eyes on its wings were the tally of everyone waiting on a return. He kept the books in a copperplate hand, and the pledges in the back room were labelled in the same careful script: a wedding band, a silver watch with a cracked crystal, a fiddle with one string still tuned. Nell had not yet learned to write a pledge without wondering who would come back for it.

She reached for the cash tin, meaning to pay out the widow from Cable Lane, and the moth lifted, settled on her knuckle, and walked a slow circle over the scar at the base of her thumb. Its feelers were fine as cotton thread. When she tipped her hand, it did not fly so much as drift towards the open door, where the streetlight caught the scalloped bands on its wings and laid them out in amber across the pavement.

She let it go. Then she turned to the last line of the ledger, drew a neat rule beneath it, and wrote in her father's hand, because it was the only one the book recognised: Nothing taken. Nothing owed.