Traditional style moth flash design in black, cream and orange, shown as a framed print on a peach background with an orange circle behind it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional moth design in a framed print

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A symmetrical moth with black-edged wings, cream scalloped bands and a round bead-like body is drawn in bold, solid linework. The moth sits centrally over a large orange circle on a peach background, shown inside a white frame. The palette is limited to black, cream, peach and orange, with the shading built from solid black fills and cream line detail.

Traditional Moth Circle Wing

Find an artist for this

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 lamp at Bwlch Ddu had been lit every night since the snow closed the upper road, and every night the moths came up out of the bracken to find it. Nell Pritchard counted them the way her father had taught her, by the wing and not by the head, because the heads were always moving. Forty by the first hour. Sixty when the wind dropped and the glass began to fog.

Keep reading

The big one came at midnight, a dark-winged thing with cream bands along its edges like the trimming on a Sunday coat. It did not dart at the flame as the small ones did. It circled the lamp on the wide sweep of the orange shade, round and round, as if it were measuring the light against something it had seen before. Nell sat on the step of the toll hut with her knees under her chin and watched it, and thought of her mother's oilskin, which had hung on the same nail for three winters.

Before dawn the snow thinned to sleet. A carter came up the pass with a load of slate, his mule blowing steam, and asked if the road was open. She said it was. He asked how she knew. She pointed at the lamp, and at the moth still turning in its glow. 'That one's been up since dusk,' she said. 'It won't leave until someone comes through.'

The carter laughed and drove on. Nell stayed until the sky greyed over the far ridge, then pinched out the wick. The moth lifted once, pale against the lightening hills, and went down the valley after the slate cart, following the sound of the wheels as if it knew the way.