Black and grey realism tattoo of a death's head moth, two skulls and a white rose, with fragments of script, on the thigh.

Moth, skulls and rose on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A death's head moth sits above two skulls, with a pale rose resting over the lower skull on the left. The shading is soft and detailed, with smooth greys and dark, high-contrast areas, and the surrounding script fragments fade into the skin. The tattoo fills most of the frame on a limb, with a hand resting at the top edge of the photo.

Realism Thigh Moth Skull Rose Script Word

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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

Mind the teapot, pet, it's older than the pier and twice as stubborn. Sit by the window where the light comes off the water and I'll tell you about the moth. It came in the summer the photographer took the back bedroom, the one with the crooked sash that rattles when the wind comes off the sea wall.

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He was a thin, quiet man called Mr Harrowgate, and he kept his developing trays in the cellar under the coal chute, where nobody was allowed to go with a candle. The moth found the larder before anyone else did. It crept under the door, ate the honey clean out of the jar, and when Mr Pell from number four tried to swat it with a rolled-up copy of the Gazette, it gave a little squeak like a rusty hinge. That pale mark on its back was a skull, grinning at you like it knew the price of the bread. My mother said a death's head in the house meant we'd lose someone by Michaelmas. She was wrong, mostly.

Mr Harrowgate found it sitting on the rose he'd cut from the churchyard wall, and he didn't shoo it. He sat with it all evening, writing sentences on slips of paper that he pinned to the curtains, each one stopping halfway as if the pen had been called away. In the morning there were two new plates drying in the cellar. Two skulls side by side, and the rose laid across the lower one as if someone had placed it for a funeral. Nobody in the house had ever seen him print a face he didn't know.

The moth was gone by breakfast, and so were the slips of paper, all but one that I found folded inside the empty honey jar. It said only: stay for the tea, I'll not be long. I've kept it in the Bible with the rose, and I'll show you both before you leave, if you finish that scone.