Black and grey tattoo on the inner forearm showing a half ribcage with spine, a stippled flower and a moth, in a dotwork style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ribcage, flower and moth on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a half-exposed ribcage and spine at the centre, with a flower with leaves on the left and a moth with spread wings below. The design is built from fine stippled dots and short hatched lines, giving soft shading and an engraved, anatomical-illustration look. It is entirely in black and grey ink and sits centrally on the forearm against a plain skin background, with a sleeve edge visible at the top.

Dotwork Botanical Forearm Ribcage Spine Flower Moth Anatomy Bone Leaves

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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

Sit nearer, the stove's gone out again, and a story told in the cold has to work twice as hard. Our Ada's grandfather kept the top field at Hollin Bank, the one that never grew anything but thistles and the odd stubborn marigold, and every January he climbed up with a lantern to see what the frost had taken. He carried a ledger and a pencil, because his father had told him the dead ought to be counted properly.

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One winter the lantern found a ewe lying still in the lee of the wall, gone in the night and not yet stiff. Her ribs stood up from the snow like the timbers of a boat drawn in charcoal, and along her spine something had settled, a pale moth with its wings spread flat as an open page. Beside it a single marigold had kept its colour under the rime. Grandfather knelt there a long while and read the field the way you'd read a seed catalogue: what grows, what keeps, what goes on without you.

He wrote nothing in the ledger that year. He sat with the moth until the cold loosened it, and it lifted off over the hedge toward the lights of the village, slow as a thought you can't quite finish. The next spring the marigolds came up thick where the ewe had lain, and the thistles, for once, kept to their side of the wall.

So when you ask me what the dead are for, child, I tell you they're the richness under the marigolds and the reason moths are slow in the mornings. Now hush, bank the fire, and we'll see whether the frost lets us sleep.