Black and grey blackwork and dotwork tattoo of a detailed moth with patterned wings, sitting on the forearm against a background of green foliage.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moth tattoo on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large moth with spread wings fills most of the forearm, with its antennae reaching up toward the elbow. The wings are built from fine stippled dots and clean black outlines, with rows of scale-like bands and small eye-spot motifs. The tattoo is rendered entirely in black and grey ink on pale skin, and the blurred conifer foliage behind the arm keeps the focus on the design.

Blackwork Dotwork Forearm Moth Wing Insect Antennae

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The moth came in under the marquee flap while Dad was still fumbling for his glasses, and it went straight for the trestle of wedding cake as if it had been invited. Nobody else saw it. I was at the end of the front row with a programme folded into a fan, and I watched it settle on the lace edge of the cake stand, wings flat and enormous, the grey and black bands on them like the rings of a sawn trunk.

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My grandfather used to say the eye spots were there to frighten off birds, that a moth with a face on its wings expected to be eaten and wanted the bird to think twice. He kept a cabinet of them in the back bedroom of the farmhouse, pinned under glass, each label in his square capitals. The last one he pinned was caught the night my mother was born, and he never let anyone open that drawer again.

When the speeches started, I crossed the wet grass in my good shoes and cupped my hands round the moth, which did not fly. It walked onto my palm with the weight of a folded letter. I carried it past the caterers and the stacked chairs to the edge of the plantation, where the spruce went black, and I opened my hands in the dusk.

It did not leave straight away. It sat on my wrist, opening and closing its wings slowly, so the eyes caught the last of the light, and then it rose into the trees as if it had somewhere to be by morning. When I went back in, Dad had found his glasses and was reading from a card with his hand shaking. I did not tell him I had been holding the one thing Grandad would have given the whole cabinet to see.