hair pencil

English

Noun

hair pencil (plural hair pencils)

1. An artist's brush made from a few fine hairs.
2. (zoology) A pheromone signalling structure found in lepidopteran males.
   • 1912, Jean-Henri Fabre, translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, The Life of the Spider chapter 10

     the thread ends suddenly in a filmy hair-pencil, a tuft, whose parts remain disjoined, just as they come from the spinneret's rose.