Black and grey flash sheet of moths and butterflies in a traditional style, arranged in rows on a mottled grey background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sheet of moths and butterflies

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A sheet of fifteen moths and butterflies arranged in staggered rows, each with detailed wings, banded bodies and feathered antennae. The linework is bold and the wings are shaded with dense hatching, stippling and solid black areas, with eyespot and scalloped patterns on many of the wings. The drawings are rendered entirely in black and grey against a mottled grey backdrop.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pass that ladle back, boy, and mind the lamp, for the moths have found it again. Every night off the Azores they come, and every night old Pim swears they are the same fifteen, flown back from wherever drowned men go to rest.

Keep reading

My first ship was the brig Patience, out of Bristol, and her cook was a man called Absalom Quick, who kept a tin of ship's biscuit under his bunk and a blunt pencil behind his ear. He drew moths on the backs of the bills of lading because the mate would not let him touch the log. Dark ones with scalloped edges, pale ones spotted like spilt ink, and some with great round eyes painted on their wings. He said the eyes were there so the bats would think the moth was looking back and would turn away.

The trouble came in the third week out, when the galley lamp guttered and the moths went hunting for the next light, which was the lantern swinging over the foremast. Quick said they crowded the rigging so thick in the dark that the mate had the watch beat them down with sailcloth. Next morning Quick was found asleep at his stove with a moth resting on his wrist, its painted eyes wide open, and he never drew another one. He said he had simply been counted.

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