Black ink dotwork drawing of a symmetrical moth with spread wings, overlaid on interlocking triangles, with a small symbol below, shown on paper as a tattoo design.

Moth with geometric triangles design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical winged insect with spread wings is drawn in black ink, with wing panels filled by fine stippled dots and scalloped edges. Interlocking triangle outlines sit behind the insect, and a small angular symbol appears in the lower left of the sheet. The drawing is in black and grey on cream paper, with a centred composition and a dark vignette around the edges of the photograph.

Dotwork Geometric Moth Wing Insect Triangle Geometric line Symbol Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mason's girl carried the lamp up the broken stair every night that autumn, because the moths would not leave the window alone. They came through the gap where the tracery had fallen, grey and dusty, two and three at a time, and settled on the sill with their wings spread flat like pages left open to dry.

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Lord Anselm had forbidden lights above the second floor. The old keep at Harrowcleve was said to hold a lady who walked the battlements when the wind came off the moor, and he would not have his men spooked into leaving the wall. So the girl kept her lamp low and climbed in the dark, while her father, Tobin, cut a mark into every stone he dressed: three triangles nested one inside another, a star folded into a box, the sign his master had taught him to hide in the joints where no one would look.

The storm came in the week of the new moon. The roof went first, then the north wall, and by morning there was only the cellar left and a grey heap of stone with the sky showing through. Tobin was under the third arch, and the girl was not. She went up the stair with the lamp anyway, and the moths were there, settled on the rubble in pairs, wings open over the lines her father had scratched into the dust for her to copy.

She knelt and traced the triangles with one finger. Where the moths sat, the stone was warm as a hearth, and when she set the lamp down the marks caught the light and held it. In spring the walls were green and the moths had gone to the fields. She still climbed up each night with a lamp, and the last stone of the keep still glowed faintly under its three nested triangles, a small light that asked nothing and was never put out.