Pencil drawing of a skull merged with a tattered moth with spiked wings, shaded in a realistic greyscale style, shown on paper with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and moth wings in pencil

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing on paper shows a human skull at the centre, with its outline merging into a moth or butterfly with ragged, torn wings. Sharp spikes or thorns pierce across the top of the skull and the wing edges, and fine hatching and soft smudged shading build up the forms. The drawing is greyscale and photographed at an angle on a light sepia sheet, with the design filling most of the frame.

Realism Skull Moth Butterfly Wing Spike Thorn Pencil drawing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The moth had come in with the rain, the way they do in October, and by the time Mrs Hollis found it on the kitchen sill it had already lost a wing to the cat. She reached for the dustpan. Her husband stopped her with the flat of his hand and said it was a death's-head, and that it was bad luck to kill one, worse to let it die in a house with the lamp still lit.

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Nobody in Sallow End could agree what it was for. Old Tanner said it carried the drowned out over the washes. His wife said it had only come for the honey jar on the dresser, which was true enough, because the moth went straight to it and dipped its long tongue into the amber, leaving a ring of sticky gold on the wood. Hollis set a saucer of sugared water out every night after that, and mended the torn wing with a thread of silk from his wife's sewing box, so it would not fall apart before the frost.

The winter the river froze to the bottom, the moth flew out on the morning they carried the miller's boy up to the churchyard. It rose past the hawthorns, its thorn-spiked wings catching the light at the lych gate, and circled the bell tower twice before it seemed to think better of the wind. It came down on the pale stone by the new grave and stayed there. Hollis did not sweep it away. He told his wife later that he had thought, for one foolish moment, that it was keeping the place.

Next morning the saucer was furred with frost and the sill was bare. Hollis found a single grey wing lying on the path by the gate, the silk still knotted at its edge, and he left it where it had fallen and went in to light the stove.