Black and grey traditional tattoo of four moths arranged in a circle with a fifth moth above it, on a shoulder.

Radial moth mandala on a shoulder

Traditional · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A radial arrangement of four moths with wings drawn as symmetrical mandala-like patterns, each with eye spots, sits on the upper shoulder. A separate moth with spread wings and antennae is placed above and to the right of the main design. The bold black outlines and grey shading are dense and even, and the design is shown against plain pale skin with no colour ink.

Traditional Shoulder Moth Mandala Wing Symmetry

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sunday, 14th September 1958. Mother says I must stop carrying the lamp into the back bedroom, but the moths come anyway, drawn up from the marsh like a rumour. Father has pinned four of them tonight on the green baize, wings spread so their markings meet at the centre, and he says a radial arrangement is the only honest way to show symmetry. He calls them his clock faces. Each eye spot, he says, is the moth's way of looking back at whatever is looking at it.

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I asked him why four. He tapped the cork with the pin and said four was the number a compass gives you, and that a thing which turns all the way round must be made of parts that agree with one another. Then he went down to the shop and left the lamp burning, and I sat with the four of them until their wings seemed to breathe.

Thursday. The fifth moth came in through the scullery window while Father was at the Weald. It is the big one with the spread wings, the death's-head kind, with a skull drawn faintly across its back, and it would not settle on the board. It went round the room three times and then lit on the glass of the cabinet just above the others, as though it were measuring them.

I have not told him. This morning the case was open and the four are still there, pinned in their ring around a single dot of cork. The fifth sits on the sill with its antennae combing the air. I left the sash up a finger's width, and when I came back at dusk the sill was empty and the lamp was out, and the pin-hole at the centre of the ring was the only thing that had not moved.