Grey and teal dotwork moth tattoo with eyespots on its wings, placed centrally across the upper back below the neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moth tattoo on upper back

Dotwork · Back · Mixed · Photo

A moth with spread wings, antennae and a segmented body is tattooed centrally across the upper back. The wings have eyespot markings and scalloped edges, built up from stippled dots and fine shading in grey. Soft teal accents appear on the body and lower wings against a pale skin tone, with a black and white damask wallpaper behind.

Dotwork Back Moth Wing Antennae Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Queen of Vellane kept her moths in the cellars beneath the royal mint, where the gold was weighed each dawn and the lamps burned through every night. My work was to feed them and to count their eyes before the bell. A moth with one eye fewer had been stolen, because the rival court at Orsk paid well for the powdered blue that the eyespots were made from, and a mind could be taught to believe almost anything if it stared at the right pattern long enough.

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The Mourner was the finest of them, the great hawk moth the old maps called the death's head. On its back the dust made a skull the colour of drowned silver, and its wings were the grey of wet slate, edged with the teal of the lake under ice. My grandmother had the cellar walls papered in black and white damask so the moths would settle against the pattern and show their markings to the lamplight. I was told it kept them calm. I have since come to think it kept them from being seen.

On the night of the first hard frost, I found a Mourner on the wall with its left hindwing torn and a grey smear of dust on the stone. Someone had been in the cellar. I followed the trail of powder up the steps to the mint, where a clerk called Ansel Coyle sat at the weighing table with his fingers blue from the cold and his coat pockets full of the stuff.

I did not raise the alarm. I carried the moth to the high grate and let it go into the frost, counting its eyes as it climbed, one, two, three, four, until the dark took the last of them. The queen never asked why the cellar smelled of lake water, and Ansel was not seen at the mint again.