Traditional style tattoo of a shaded skull merged with a red, orange and black moth with eye spots, on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and moth on an upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A grey shaded skull sits in front of a moth whose wings spread out to the right, with eye spots and a dotted red and orange wing pattern. The skull has bold black outlines, with red accents in the eye and nasal areas. Black and grey shading on the skull contrasts with saturated red, orange and yellow on the wings, all set on a curved upper arm.

Traditional Upper arm Skull Moth

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, then, and mind the lamp, because the moth doesn't care for draughts. My grandmother kept the light at Scarrow Point, the little tower on the north wall of Hallam Quay, and she always said the trouble started the winter the fishermen stopped watching the water and started watching the sky.

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Every night the herring boats came in under the lantern, and every night something came in with them. Big brown moths with a skull drawn across their shoulders, pale as bleached sailcloth, with painted eyes on their wings that opened wider when the lamp flared. The men called them death's-heads and spat over the side. Gran called them the lamplighters' cousins, because they went straight for the flame and never once looked back at the dark they'd come out of.

One night a girl from the net loft, Ada Penhallow, took a jam jar and a clean rag and climbed the tower stairs. She caught the biggest moth against the glass, its red wings banded orange like a sunset cut into strips, and held it up to the beam. Gran swore the moth looked back at her with those painted eyes and did not move. Then Ada unscrewed the lid and let it go, out over the harbour mouth where the fog sat thickest.

The boats came home that week, every one of them. Gran never could say whether the moth had carried the storm off or whether Ada had simply been braver than the dark. Mind you, she kept the lamp burning after that, and the moths kept coming. That, she said, was the whole point of a light.