White sweatshirt printed with black and grey tattoo-style designs of swallows, a large moth, feathers and a star, in a traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tattoo-style print sweatshirt with swallows and moth

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A white sweatshirt is printed with several tattoo-style designs, including two swallows, a large moth, two feathers, a star and an eye. The linework is bold and black, with shading in grey on the moth and feathers. The designs are spread across the front and sleeves in a photo taken at close range.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

'Mind the lamp, boy, the moth won't leave it alone. That's how it was aboard the Marigold out of Shields in the winter of eighteen seventy-one, when we had nineteen days of grey between the Azores and the Horn and not a star to steer by.

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Cook Abel Dunning swore the moth had come aboard at Lisbon, tucked in a crate of oranges, and that it was the soul of a drowned ship's boy come back to watch us. Nobody laughed. Every night it sat on the lamp glass with its wings open like a pair of lace curtains, and every night the second mate, Hollis, would wake before the watch changed and stare at it until it flew. He said it was counting. Counting what, nobody asked.

On the nineteenth night the cloud tore open for a quarter hour, and Hollis took a sight by the one star the moth had settled beneath. We raised the Falklands by the end of the week. Swallows came in off the rigging that same morning, the way they always do when land is close, and one of them perched on Hollis's shoulder and stayed there while he ate his biscuit.

When we paid off in Shields, he walked up the quay with a swallow inked on each hand, a gull's feather on his wrist, and an eye on the back of his neck so he'd never again sail blind. The moth, Dunning swore, was still on the lamp when they doused it. I'd like to tell you I believed him. I did not. But I looked.'

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