Black dotwork moth drawing with spread wings set over a red mandala pattern on a cream background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moth within a red mandala

Dotwork · Mixed · Flash

A moth with spread wings, shaded in black stippled dots, sits at the centre of a circular design. The surrounding mandala is drawn in red line work with layered petal and scalloped lace-like rings. The plain cream background keeps the design isolated.

Dotwork Geometric Moth Mandala Floral pattern

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the bench, it's older than my grandmother's cough. You want the tale of the Lacewood weaver's daughter, who could not sleep for the moths. They came to her window every night of the dry season, grey ones and brown ones, all of them drawn to the lamp she kept burning for her husband, who had gone over the salt hills to sell the good wool and had not come back.

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One night a moth bigger than the rest knocked at the shutter with its wings. It was dusted black as a chimney and spotted all over like someone had pressed a pin through a sheet of soot a thousand times. She asked it what it wanted. It said nothing, only opened its wings wide enough to fill the doorway, and there on the inside of each one was a ring of red, rising petal over petal, the way the lace on the old queen's collar was worked, layer on layer, until the eye could not find the edge of it.

She understood then that the pattern was a road. She followed the rings out past the orchard, past the dry well, around and around the hills, each turn a little wider, until at the very rim she found her husband sitting on a stone with his cart broken beside him and his hat in his lap. He had been walking in circles for a month, afraid to leave the pattern because he could not see the way out of it.

So she took his hand, and she walked him inward, toward the centre, where the moth was waiting with its wings spread open on the cream-coloured dust. Every road in this valley leads back to that lamp, if you are patient enough to follow it. Now, who wants the next one?