Pen sketch of a skull set between moth wings, drawn on paper as a tattoo design with loose linework and rays around it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and moth tattoo sketch

Black and grey · Flash

A pen and ink sketch of a human skull at the centre, with large moth wings spreading out on either side and a segmented, pointed body below the skull. Loose, searching linework with light hatching in the skull and wings, and short radiating marks around the top of the design. The image is black and grey on a tinted paper background, with the drawing filling most of the frame.

Skull Moth Wing Sketch

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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

The moth came to the lamp every night for the whole of the dry season, and by the time the rains arrived in Vessary the lamplighter had stopped trying to shoo it away. Old Ilse said a moth that comes back that often is carrying a debt, and the debt is always to the dead. She said it the way she said most things, with her eyes on the bread she was kneading, so nobody paid her much mind until the bell tower at Saint Oram's went quiet.

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The bell had been ringing for the drowned men of the Harrow ferry, and when the ringer, a boy called Tobin Vell, climbed up to see why it had stopped, he found the rope cut clean and a grey moth sitting on the bronze lip of the bell. Its wings were webbed with fine black veins, and in the hollow of its back was a skull no larger than a plum, its jaw open as if it were about to speak. The boy reached for it. The moth lifted, circled him twice, and went down the stairwell ahead of him like a lantern being carried away.

It led him to the river, to the reed bed below the ferry steps, where the water was still and the mud was stitched with the tracks of something that had walked on two feet and dragged its feet behind it. The skull hovered over a bundle of wet cloth, and the boy knelt and unwound it, and inside was the ferryman's ledger, every fare written in a careful hand, and the last entry was for a single passenger, paid in full, bound for the far bank.

Tobin rang the bell that evening, properly this time, and the moth sat on the rope and watched him do it until the stars came out.