Black and grey dotwork moth tattoo with fine radiating lines on the upper back, below dark hair.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moth with geometric lines on upper back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A moth with spread wings sits centred on the upper back, with its wing patterns built from fine dots and short strokes. Thin geometric lines radiate outward from behind the body and wings, framing the motif. The image is monochrome, with soft grey shading on the skin and a plain, uncluttered background.

Dotwork Geometric Back Moth Insect Wing Geometric line Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had got under the awning by eleven, so I shifted the box of engraved plates onto the crates and let the drips fall on the tarpaulin instead. Saturday at Hobb Street Market always smells of wet cardboard and frying onions, and nobody buys natural history in weather like this. I was packing up when the moth found me.

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It came in under the lamp of the hot dog van opposite and settled on the corner of my ledger, wings flat as a pressed leaf. Dusty grey, with a pale fan on each wing built from dots, the way engravers stippled a shadow when they had no time for hatching. Fine lines ran out from behind it like the spokes of a compass rose on an old chart of the Bristol Channel. I knew the drawing before I knew the insect. Old Mr Pellow sold me that plate thirty years ago and swore the moth had never been caught alive in Cornwall.

I tried to be sensible. I slid the plate into its sleeve, shut the ledger, and walked the length of the market with my collar up. When I looked back, the moth was still on the ledger's edge, not moving, keeping its place as if it had been told to wait. So I did what Pellow would have done. I sat on an upturned crate and waited to see what it wanted.

By the time the van man pulled his shutter down, the rain had thinned to nothing. The moth lifted, circled the lamp once, and went north over the roofs. Under the ledger lay a single grey scale, pressed flat as a coin. I still keep it in an envelope marked Pellow, do not sell.