Black and grey moth tattoo with circular eye-spot wings on a person's ribs, with a black lace bralette pulled aside.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moth tattoo on the ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey moth tattoo with outlined wings and circular eye-spot markings sits on the side of the ribcage. The linework is bold and the wings are partly shaded with grey, set against plain skin. The frame is cropped below the chin, showing a dark lace top and a hand at the upper edge, with a soft indoor background.

Ribs Moth Wing Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The road over Caddan Pass was too narrow for two carts, so the carters shouted before each bend and the moths learned to listen. Nobody in the valley could say which had started it. Old Ysolde kept a jar on the sill of the toll house, and every spring she tipped the grey moths out onto the lintel so they could climb to the rocks where the snow lay longest.

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The night Tomas Revel tried the pass alone with a cart of salt, the fog came down thick as fleece. He lost the track twice. Off the edge the ground fell away into nothing. Then he saw a pair of pale rings low on a boulder, and another beyond it, and then a whole string of them opening and closing like lamps turned up and down. Each ring had a dark dot at its centre, like an eye that had already made up its mind. He followed them one step at a time.

They took him across the saddle and down the far side without a word. When his boots found the cobbles of the inn yard, the rings lifted from the rock and he understood they had been counting his steps, one for each, the way Ysolde counted coins. She had told him the toll. A crosser must give the pass one look back, or the watchers keep the step.

He turned in the yard and looked up at the black shoulder of the mountain. The rings went out one by one, like candles in a draught. In the morning the salt had dried white across his palms, and on the lintel of the toll house sat a single grey moth with its wing eyes open, facing the road.