Black and grey drawing of a skull with butterfly wings, held up by two hands in front of a person's face against a plain grey background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and butterfly wing drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A monochrome drawing shows a human skull whose upper body merges into a butterfly, with one large patterned wing extending to the right and a smaller wing below. The linework is fine and the shading is soft and textured, with dark tonal areas in the eye socket and wing markings. The drawing is held up by two hands, covering the person's face, against a plain grey backdrop.

Skull Butterfly Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The carter's mule would not go past the cairn at Hollin Gap, so Margit walked the last mile herself with the lamp tied to her wrist. Her brother had gone up the pass in March to fetch the sheep down before the snow. The sheep had come down without him, nosing at the byre door as though they had been turned out by a hand they did not trust.

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The shepherds said the moths were the trouble. Every dusk a pale grey one came drifting out of the scree, larger than a palm, its wings ribbed like old slate, and wherever it settled the stones went cold enough to crack. Nobody who followed one came back to say what it had shown them. Margit did not believe such talk until she reached the cairn and the moth lifted from it and opened its wings, and there in the dust of its own body was her brother's jaw, the gap in his teeth, and bare bone where his cheek should have been.

The old woman at the inn had told her to offer bread. Margit had none, so she held out the lamp instead. The moth took the flame into its dark wing the way a clerk folds a letter he has finished with, and the light went out. Her eyes adjusted slowly. Below the pass the valley lay black except for the farm, and the flock was already crossing the stream without a shepherd.

She reached the farm at first light. Her mother, who had never let a moth past the step, was standing in the doorway with her arms folded, and on the gatepost beside her sat a small pale moth, its wings closed like a shut book. Her mother looked at Margit, then at the moth, and stepped aside to let it in.