Black ink drawing of an ornate moth design with dotted patterns and dangling beaded chains on the wings, shown as a flash sketch with no placement on the body.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental moth design in black ink

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn moth with outstretched wings, filled with symmetrical ornamental patterns of scallops, diamonds and small circles. Strings of dots and beads hang from the lower wing edges, finished with small teardrop shapes. The work is in black linework and grey shading on white paper, with two pens lying across the top and right of the frame.

Dotwork Geometric Moth Insect Ornamental pattern Dot Bead Mandala

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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

The moth arrived at twenty to three, when the corridor lights were dimmed to the colour of weak tea and the only sound on Ward Nine was the drip stand ticking beside bed six. You were charting obs on a clipboard when it landed on the edge of the sheet, wings spread flat as a pressed fan, every panel filled with scallops and diamonds that looked as if someone had stitched them slowly by hand.

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Bea Okafor, the night sister, saw you staring and laughed through her teeth. "Leave it be. They always find the one window that doesn't shut." She had worked nights for nineteen years and claimed she could read a ward by its insects: moths for a long night, a wasp for a bad one. You wrote that down as a joke, then crossed it out, because the moth had begun to drag its fringe of beads across the paper, each dot and teardrop leaving a faint pale smudge where it touched.

At four the call bell went on bay two and you ran. When you came back the moth was gone and the window was open a finger's width. Bea had squared the clipboard on the desk. Beneath your last line of obs, in a hand you did not recognise as hers, someone had drawn a small ornate moth, its lower wings hung with tiny beads that ended in drops of ink. You kept the page. Nobody on nights ever tears out a drawing.