Black ink drawing of a moth with skulls across its outspread wings, shown as a tattoo design without a body placement.

Skull-winged moth design

Black and grey · Flash

A moth is drawn front-on with outspread wings, and each wing contains a skull with hollow eye sockets and teeth. The linework is pen-and-ink with dense hatching on the wings and body, plus fine lines for the wing veins and antennae. The drawing is in black ink on a plain white background, with the subject centred and fully visible.

Moth Skull Wing Insect Antennae

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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 mirror ball at the Starlight Ballroom had been turning since seven, throwing its loose coins of light across the parquet, and every moth in Margate seemed to have climbed the seafront stairs to get at them. I stood behind the cloakroom hatch with a tray of numbered tickets and watched one settle on the brass counter, wings spread flat as a pair of playing cards. Someone had painted a skull into each wing, two hollow eyes and a grin of tiny teeth, and the grin was turned towards me.

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Mr Achterberg, who ran the place and counted the takings twice, said moths were a cleaning matter and I should brush it into the bin. But I knew better than to brush a thing that had come in on its own. My mother used to say the dead drift into dance halls because they miss the feet. I was seventeen and didn't believe her, but I believed the moth. It stayed through the whole of the quickstep and the slow waltz after, and only lifted when Ronnie Cole came up the stairs in his demob suit, asking for his hat.

Ronnie had gone to Caen in 1944 and sent one letter, which said the rain never stopped and the bread was grey. He'd bought the hat in Ramsgate before he left, a brown trilby with a striped band, and he tapped the brim when he saw me, the way he used to do on the pier. I gave him ticket 214 and he gave me a shilling he didn't owe me.

When I turned to fetch the hat, the moth rose off the counter, circled the mirror ball twice, and slipped out through the fire door into the dark. Its dust was left on the brass in a faint gold smudge. Ronnie's hat sat in my hands, still warm from his head, and the band smelled of Brylcreem and salt.