Two black and cream moth designs with dotwork spots, crescent moon and geometric wing panels, shown as painted boards on a dark wooden surface.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two black and cream moth designs on boards

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows two moth designs drawn in black with cream highlights on dark wooden boards. Each moth has symmetrical wings filled with circles, dots and stars, a segmented body and drip-like shapes below the abdomen. The line work is bold and even, with the cream areas giving a high-contrast, flat finish with no shading or colour.

Blackwork Moth Crescent moon Dot Star Geometric pattern Drop

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth found the moth on the fourth-floor landing at ten past two, lying on the lino with its wings spread as if it had been pinned there. The strip light above the bin chute had been dying since August, flickering like a bad tooth, and every night the moths came in through the broken vent to crowd it. She swept them into a dustpan with the edge of a cereal box, the way her mum used to lift spiders out of the bath.

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Upstairs, in flat 1408, Mr Dunleavy had left his lino-cutting boards stacked against the radiator. He had sold prints from them at the Saturday market under the name Cold Iron, and he had died in March with the kettle still warm. His daughter had asked Ruth to take whatever was left before the council cleared the flat. The boards were black on the outside and cream where he had gouged the pattern away: rings of dots, a crescent moon, rows of little stars like rivets, and moths with striped bodies and tails that broke into drops.

Ruth sat on his sofa with the dustpan on her knees and tilted the top board toward the window. Forty storeys of other people's kitchens glowed back at her, most of them dark by now. She counted the circles on one wing, then the other, and found they matched to the last dot, which struck her as the most careful thing a man could do with a long life.

She carried the board down in the lift, which smelled of wet pram covers, and propped it on the bin chute ledge under the flickering tube. By six the moths had found it, dozens of them, settling on the black edges as if the board were a window they could finally trust. The light came on by itself at the hour it always did, and for once Ruth did not sweep anything up.