Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a moth with eyespot markings on its wings and feathered antennae.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moth with eyespot wings in dotwork

Dotwork · Black and grey · Photo

A large moth with fully spread wings sits across the skin, with a black outline and feathered antennae at the head. The wings have eyespot patterns, banded sections and fine ridged edges. Shading is built from stippled dots and fine lines, giving soft grey tones, and the design fills most of the frame against a pale background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Leave that lamp alone, our Eddie, I've told you. You want to know why the moths come to the glass? My mother said the big ones come looking for a face they recognise, and those rings on their wings are only there so they'll have something to look back at.

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It was the August after the Coronation, the bunting still hanging limp outside the Co-op in Haddon Row. A moth the size of a man's hand settled on our kitchen sill and wouldn't be shifted. Walter wanted it swatted with the newspaper. I put a saucer of milk out instead, because my hands were shaking and I didn't trust them with anything else. By morning there were nine of them on the sill, all fanned open, their eyes turned towards the stove where I'd been up all night.

They went at first light, when the 6.12 came through the cutting and rattled the cups in the dresser. Walter came in from his shift at the junction and found the sill bare except for a fine grey dust in two rings, one on each pane, as neat as thumbprints. He didn't say a word. He just took his cap off and set it on the dresser, which is the most he ever said about anything he couldn't mend.

I keep that glass in the back room now. Eddie, you can have it when I'm gone. Hold it up to the lamp and tell me what you see. Go on. Don't look away first.

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