Grey and pink tattoo of an outlined winged shape with a pink ribbon-like form and small stars, on the lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged shape with pink ribbon on a calf

Other · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows an outlined winged shape with a pink ribbon-like form curling through its centre, set among small white star shapes. The linework is dark and bold around the wings, with soft grey shading that spreads outwards like a cloud behind the design. Grey tones dominate, with pink used for the central form, and the design is centred on the lower leg against a plain pale wall.

Other Wing Ribbon Star Butterfly Leg

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire is eating the good wood and I am too old to fetch more. You want the one about the thread-moth? Then listen, because I tell it once and the stars do not wait.

Keep reading

In the years when the river still ran red with the rains, there lived a moth-winged woman called Ailu who kept the night for the shepherds of Ysra. She had wings like pressed linen, lined in black where the dust had settled, and each night she flew up over the hills with a spool of pink silk tied to her wrist. Her task was to stitch the dark closed so no one fell through it.

But the dark was hungry, and every night it bit a hole in her work. Those holes are the stars you see now, small and bright, and every one of them is a place where the silk ran out. Ailu counted them each dawn, and she counted until her eyes went grey as ash. One winter a boy from the lower village climbed the ridge to find her. He had nothing, no gift, no song, only a cracked bowl of barley. He said, 'You are unravelling, and no one thanks you for it.' She laughed, and it sounded like wind through a shuttered door. She tied the last length of her silk around his thumb and told him to hold the sky while she rested. He held it all night. When dawn came the boy was still there, the spool was empty, and the ribbon had made a bright seam from one horizon to the other.

That is why the moth-woman's wings are pink at the heart, and why the mist hangs grey on the hills. Go to sleep now. The stitching is holding.