Black and grey blackwork and dotwork tattoo of a moth above a mandala design on the wrist, photographed against a dark background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moth over mandala on the wrist

Blackwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A moth with outstretched wings sits above a symmetrical mandala-style motif made of radiating lines and fine dots. The linework is solid black with clean, crisp edges, and the wing scales are rendered with stacked black strokes. The tattoo is shown in black and grey against a dark background, centred on the wrist with the hand visible below.

Blackwork Dotwork Geometric Hand Moth Mandala Geometric pattern Dot Lotus

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mira had been told the rose window would come down by Friday, and she had until then to find the one pane painted by a man who never signed his work. The scaffold groaned under the chapel dome. Below, the sodium lamps of the street leaked through the glass and turned the lead lines into the spokes of a wheel someone had drawn in soot.

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A moth had been circling her torch since she climbed up. It was the grey-brown kind, the size of a thumbprint folded in half, and each time it drifted near the coloured glass it settled on the same segment, the one with pale blue petals fanning out from a dotted centre. She had seen that pattern before, on the old drawings in the diocese archive: a lotus, or what the architect had called one, built from points pricked into vellum with a compass.

She climbed down at three, pencilled the moth's position on her cuff, and went to the archive. The drawings were where she had left them. In the margin of the eastern sheet, someone had written in faded ink: Do not repair the moth. It keeps the glass from cracking in frost. She laughed alone in the reading room, then stopped laughing and copied the line into her notebook.

Friday came. The window was lifted out piece by piece, and she left the moth segment in its frame with a strip of lead tape and a promise to the foreman. Walking home through the wet streets, she passed a bakery whose light had drawn a dozen moths to the glass, all of them settled in a neat ring, all of them facing the same way.