This is a fairly variable species with greyish or reddish-brown forewings, often marked with darker bands.

The common name derives from the prominent stigma ranging in colour from white or yellow to red, which has two smaller spots close to it, appearing to be in orbit.

The species is very tolerant to cold temperatures and has a very varied habitat – including open grasslands, forests, mountains (up to 1800 m in the Alps), and subarctic tundra.

Forewing grey brown, with deeper suffusion; inner and outer lines fine, and more or less erect, the inner straight, the outer waved; a bent median shade, one before the inner line, and another close beyond the outer; submarginal line pale, interrupted, preceded and followed by dark shades; claviform and orbicular stigmata obsolete; reniform in the type form orange yellow, with a white dot above and below it; fringe concolorous, preceded by pale marginal lunules; hindwing fuscous brown.

Linne's type form, showing a yellow reniform with two white dots, especially in combination with the grey-brown ground colour, is decidedly rare; as a rule, when the reniform is yellow, the tendency is for the upper, and often the lower also, of the two dots to become yellow also; when all three spots are deep reddish orange we have the form brunnea Lampa; albipuncta Strand is the form with white reniform, in which the dots also are always white; the term rufescens Tutt, in which the ground colour is more or less rufous tinged, would apply to the more ordinary European form as well as to the British.