The image began as a very rough, quick sketch I made in Procreate during a long road journey. Somewhere between passing landscapes and drifting thoughts, the idea appeared: a quiet figure wearing a crown not of jewels, but of skulls. Not trophies, but former selves.

In the finished work, the girl stands beneath this fragile architecture of memory. Atlas moths sit among the skulls like small living threads connecting past and present. In one image she gently holds a moth, opening her mouth as if she might swallow it. In another, delicate wings emerge from her mouth instead.

The gesture suggests that memories are not simply stored. They are absorbed, transformed, and sometimes allowed to fly free again.

The character was created with MetaHuman in Unreal Engine. Her bandages were designed in Marvelous Designer and textured in Substance Painter. The butterflies and wings were built using my own macro photographs of an Atlas moth, Attacus atlas, taken in August 2025. I used focus stacking to produce extremely detailed images, then created materials from these photographs and applied them onto simple polygon planes to construct the moths and wings inside Unreal Engine.

The final images were rendered entirely in Unreal Engine, with only minimal colour correction in Photoshop.

The skulls above her are not symbols of death.
They are an archive of creatures she once was.