Black line drawing of an ornate moth design with a skull on its body, lace-patterned wings and hanging beaded chains.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate moth with skull and beaded chains

Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a symmetrical moth with a skull at the centre of its body and an ornate crest above its head. The wings are filled with lace-like mesh, scrollwork and small floral motifs, drawn in clean black outline. Strands of chain with beads hang beneath the wings against a plain white background.

Moth Skull Lace Chain Bead Floral Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The moth had been sitting on the paraffin lamp for three nights before Ada Pell thought to ask it what it wanted. Nobody else in the wagon would have noticed it. The Halloran & Sons fair was packing up in Lincoln, and the lamp was the only warm thing left in the lace tent, where she mended the fortune-teller's shawls by its light.

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Its wings were the colour of wet slate, scrolled and stitched with a mesh so fine she could not have made it with her best bobbins. In the middle of its body sat a small white skull, grinning as if it had heard a joke from someone dead. Tobias had always said the death's-head moth was a bad omen and a good companion, and he had kept one pinned in a biscuit tin until the winter he went into the river.

On the third night she set a crumb of sugar on the rim of a thimble and talked to it about the Boston Stump and the price of coal. She told it about the glass chains that hung from the big top, and how she had strung a dozen for the fortune-teller's new dress. By morning she had made it a chain of its own, seed beads on black silk, looped beneath its wings like a mourner's veil.

When she carried the lamp out to the field, the moth rose in a slow spiral, shaking its beads loose one by one into the wet grass. The first grey light caught the lace of its wings. Ada stood among the tent pegs, counting the beads she had strung, and found that not one of them was missing.