Dotwork drawing of a moth with spread wings set within overlapping outline triangles, shown as a tattoo design on paper.

Moth within overlapping geometric triangles

Dotwork · Colour · Flash

A moth with spread wings sits at the centre of interlocking triangle outlines, with a downward triangle at the base. The wings and body are built from dense stippled dots, while the triangles are drawn with clean single lines. The blue ink sits on a cream sheet, and the composition is symmetrical and centred on the page.

Dotwork Geometric Moth Triangle Geometric shape Stipple Insect Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad had pegged the walled garden into triangles the summer the glasshouse cracked, string pulled taut between iron stakes, and I was the one who had to sit with the lamp and count the knots. Nobody else would stay out past the church bells. The moths came to the lamp the way they came to everything, without asking.

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The big one arrived on the third night, a hawk moth or near enough, its wings the colour of wet slate with pale eyes stitched along their edges. It settled on the apex of my largest triangle, right where the string crossed the others, and would not be shifted by a stick or a breath. I told myself it only wanted warmth. Dad said moths steer by the nearest straight line to the moon and mistake our lamps for it, which meant the creature had been trying to reach something above us and had got caught in our tidy drawing instead.

On the sixth night I took the string down. I cut each triangle loose and let the stakes fall, and the moth lifted off the bare earth as if it had only been waiting for the lines to stop. It rose over the wall and the glasshouse and out past the tower, to where nothing was pegged at all.

Dad never asked where the string had gone. In the morning I found the lamp still burning at the foot of the old wall, its light scattered across the gravel in a fine grey dust, thick near the top and thinning to nothing at the point, as if something had settled there and then left. I swept it into a tin and kept the tin on the windowsill, where it still catches the light.