Black and grey ornamental moth tattoo with circular eyespots and dotwork shading on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental moth on an inner arm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large moth with spread wings fills the inner arm, its wings patterned with concentric circles, scalloped bands and radiating motifs. The linework is bold and the shading is built from fine dots and stippling, giving the wings depth and texture. The design is entirely black and grey and is centred on the forearm against a plain skin background.

Traditional Blackwork Dotwork Forearm Moth Ornament Circle Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The moth came to the boarding house at Scarrow Bay the week the herring boats went out late, and Mrs Ferrier swore it had been drawn on the wallpaper before anyone checked the attic. Its wings were the grey of wet slate, rings inside rings, and where the rings met there were little eyes that opened when a lamp was lit and closed when the lamp was moved away.

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Her lodger, a surveyor called Tomas Quill who measured the cliff for a railway that never came, said it was only a moth and would die by the Sabbath. He was not wrong about the dying, but he was wrong about the Sabbath. It lived through the storm that took the chimney pot, and through the spring tides, and sat on the banister each morning like a clerk waiting for his pay.

On the last night of the herring, the sea came up the lane to the very gate. Mrs Ferrier went up with a candle and found the attic window open and the moth gone from the wallpaper. In its place, on the sill, lay a single scale, pale as a shell and ringed like a tide mark. She pressed it into her apron pocket and went down to the kitchen, where the kettle had boiled dry and the bay was quiet for the first time in a fortnight.

In the morning the cliff path was clear, and the railway men were gone, and Tomas Quill was found asleep in the dunes with his measuring chain looped round his wrist. He woke, and asked for his tea, and did not once mention the moth again.