Black and grey traditional style moth design drawn on white paper, with bold solid wings, scalloped edges and dotted borders.

Traditional moth flash design

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A drawn moth with outstretched wings and long curled antennae, shown in profile on a sheet of white paper resting on a dark wooden surface. The wings use solid black fills, fan-like striped panels and rows of dotted scallops along the edges, with the body shaded in black and grey. The design is centred on the sheet and shown at a slight angle, with a plain background that keeps the linework clear.

Traditional Moth Wing Antennae Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Put the kettle on again, lad, because this is the part where Nell Pardoe stops being sensible. The lamp at Scarrow Point had been out since the gale took the cable, and the boats came in blind that winter, feeling their way past the rocks by the sound of the bell.

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Nell kept the bell. Her father had kept it before her, and his hands shook so badly by the end that she did the striking for him. Every night she climbed the iron stair with a tin of paraffin and a rag, and every night a moth the size of a girl's palm came to the glass and knocked against it, fanning those striped wings like a lady at a dance in Whitby. Big brown thing, edged all round with pale scallops, as if somebody had sewn it a lace collar.

Her father called it a bad omen, a death's-head sort of creature. Nell said it was only hungry, so she trimmed a lamp and left it burning in the window for the moth. When the fleet came home through the February fog, that moth beat against the lantern and threw its shadow out across the water, wide and dark and steady as a pointing finger, and the skippers steered on it and rounded the point without a scrape.

Nobody ever saw the moth again. In spring Nell found one wing pinned to the lamp housing, dry as a page from an old ledger, and she put it in her father's tin with the rag. The bell still rings for the boats. If you climb the stair tonight and stand very still, you'll see a shadow on the glass that isn't yours, and it will wait for you to blink first.