Colour traditional tattoo of a shell, moth, leaves and panther head on a limb, with a beetle and another tattoo partly visible at the edges.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional shell, moth and panther tattoo

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A bold traditional design shows a shell at the base with a stem of green leaves rising to a moth with eye-like markings, above a cluster of red-tipped leaves and coral-toned flowers. A panther head with yellow eyes sits to the right, and a green beetle and part of another tattoo appear at the lower edges. Solid black outlines and flat, saturated colour are used throughout, with the design filling the frame against lightly lit skin.

Traditional Other Shell Moth Panther Beetle Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mabel Quarrie swept the boards of the Lantern Hall every night after the last waltz, and every night she found a shell on the step by the stove, a whelk the colour of a fired brick, though there was no sea within forty miles of Harrow Vale. She put them in a jam jar. By the first frost the jar was full and she had started to wonder who was leaving them.

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The band that winter was the Greenwood Five, who played with their coats on because the boiler had failed in October. The fiddler, a long thin man called Abel Teal, never looked up when he played. On the night of the Harvest Ball a moth came in through the broken fanlight and settled on the lid of the piano. It had two round marks on its wings, like eyes that had been open a long time. Nobody else seemed to see it. When Mabel went to shoo it out, it opened its wings and she saw the room reflected there: every couple turning, the lamps swinging, and the fiddler's face gone pale and wet.

She went home and told her mother, who said a dance hall is built on something, and the something is always hungry. Her mother gave her a sprig of rue and told her to walk back the long way, past the old quarry where a panther was said to sleep. Mabel saw no panther. She saw instead a green beetle on the gatepost, bright as a wet bottle. She gave it the rue, and it went off down the lane ahead of her like a lantern being carried.

By spring the Greenwood Five had left Harrow Vale without their fiddler, and nobody could say whether Abel Teal had gone with them or stayed behind in the dark of the hall. Mabel never found out. The jar sat on her windowsill for years, full of shells that still held the sound of the sea if you put one to your ear.