Black ink pen drawing of a tattoo design showing a woman with closed eyes and flowing hair, with a moon, moths, a bird and skulls, on a cream background.

Woman with moon, moths and skulls design

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A pen and ink drawing of a woman with closed eyes and a single tear, her long hair flowing around a crescent moon, moths, a bird, flowers and two skulls. The fine, hatched linework builds shading in the hair and the moon, and the design is shown in black and grey on cream paper. The composition is tall and narrow, with the figure centred and the motifs arranged around her to suit a sleeve or full panel.

Fine line Woman Moon Moth Skull Bird Flower Hair Crescent moon Tear

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell counted the moths again before the cage went down. Eleven had gathered round the lamp above the winding house, pale as the spoil heaps behind them, and her mother said eleven was a bad number for a flooded drift. Her mother said a great many things that fortnight, most of them to the kettle, and none of them to Nell, who had stopped sleeping in the bed by the window and took to sitting on the step with her boots laid out.

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The water had come through the old workings on a Tuesday. Forty men were on the night shift. Thirty-eight came up by the back road from the next pit, Tom among them with a cut above one eye and a story he would not finish. The two still below were Dan Greaves and a lad from Hollin Row whose name Nell never learned. Each evening the crescent moon lifted over the headframe, and the rook that roosted in the wheel housing shook out its feathers and flapped off towards the tip, as if it had a shift of its own to keep.

On the nineteenth night Nell carried the paraffin lamp up the tip and set it on a shelf of slate. The moths came, as she knew they would, and the flame hissed and leaned. She thought of the cage bell and how it rang just before a man was lost. Then she turned the wick down until the light gave out. The moon was enough, cold and cratered, and the moths forgot the dead lamp and turned to the silver instead, a drift of them rising over the colliery yard like smoke that had lost track of its fire.

At first light the cage came up with Dan Greaves, grey to the lips but breathing. The lad from Hollin Row came after, carried on a board. Nell did not tell her mother about the lamp. She climbed back up the tip that evening and found the rook on the slate, picking at the crimped rim of the empty tin, and she let it be.