Traditional style tattoo of a black and red moth with a central eye motif and fern fronds on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moth with fern fronds in traditional style

Traditional · Mixed · Photo

A large moth with black wings, outlined in bold black lines and filled with fine hatched shading, is centred on the image. Concentric circles form the body and red bands with dotted edges run across the wings, with a pair of black fern fronds rising from the upper left. The tattoo is shown in close, slightly angled view against plain skin and a dark background.

Traditional Moth Fern Eye Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The moth came to the mill house the night after they buried Tom Garrow, and it did not go to the lamp the way moths should. It settled on the bread board on the sill, where the crusts were kept for the birds, and sat there with its wings open, the red bands bright as coals in the dark. Ada Penrose did not chase it off. Her mother had told her that the wood at the edge of Ashby Down sent its moths to houses where something was owed.

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She followed it out past the bramble wall at first light, the bracken still stiff with frost and black where the cold had caught it. The moth went ahead of her, low and steady, and where it flew the fern fronds rose up out of the ground to show her the way, combing the mist aside with their feathered fingers. At the hollow oak the moth came down onto the split bark and turned its pale ring of an eye toward her, and she understood that it had been waiting for her to stop walking.

The wood asked nothing she could name. It only wanted her to look, and so she looked, and saw her husband in the hollow of the oak as he had been in March, mending the cart wheel with his sleeves rolled up, whistling through his teeth. She asked the wood to let her keep that much. The moth closed its wings, and the red on them dulled to brown, and when she opened her hand there was only grey dust in her palm and a small ring of light where the eye had been.

By morning the crusts were gone from the sill and the bread board was bare. Ada still leaves a little out each night, for whatever comes to the window to look.