Pencil drawing of a neo-traditional tattoo design with a skull, crown, flower, feathers, roses, death's head moths and an eye with a tear, shown on paper with no body part visible.

Skull, crown and moth flash design

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a tattoo design centred on a skull beneath a crown and a layered flower, framed by feathers and roses. Two death's head moths sit either side of a circular eye with a single tear, above a sunburst of radiating lines. The shading is fine and detailed in greys, with the outlines built up through cross-hatching and soft tonal blending across the whole composition.

Neo-trad Traditional Skull Crown Flower Feather Rose Moth Eye Tear Sunburst

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The night sister on Ward Seven kept her lamp turned low, because the moths came to any light left burning after midnight. The porters hated them. They were big and brown and furred like old velvet, and the pattern on their backs looked like a skull pressed into the wing with a thumb. The porters swept them off the sills with folded newspaper. Sister Agnes Holloway did not sweep them. She said they were only doing what everyone did at that hour, looking for the one bright thing in the room.

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Her grandmother had told her why. Long ago a king lost his crown in the river, and the moths carried it back up to him, one thread at a time, so that he would not have to face the dark with nothing on his head. Agnes had never believed it, but she had never stopped leaving the lamp on either.

One night a boy in bed four asked her whether the moths had come for him. She told him no, they had come for the lamp, and that a lamp was no business of theirs. He wanted to know what the eye was for, the one painted above the moths on his mother's bag, so she told him about the eye that keeps watch while the rest of the house sleeps. Down the corridor his mother was crying quietly into the vending machine's hum, and Agnes took her a cup of tea and a tissue and sat with her until the clock said five.

At dawn the sills were bare. The moths had gone out through the propped window the way they came. On the ledge by bed four there was a fine grey dust in the shape of a small crown, and Agnes left it for the morning cleaner, who would sweep it away without knowing what it had been.