Black and grey fine line tattoos of a beetle and a skeletal bird with fern sprigs across two forearms.

Beetle and bird skeleton on forearms

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two forearms show paired tattoos: a winged beetle with fern sprigs on the upper arm and a skeletal bird with a curved beak and fern fronds below it. Both designs use fine, detailed linework with fine stippling and light shading, in an engraved, specimen-drawing style. Faint diagram lines, small numerals and a dotted border frame the artwork, and a few pale grey-green fern traces sit on the left forearm.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Beetle Insect Wing Bird Skeleton Fern Sprig

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had come in off the estuary before the stalls were half set up, so Marta Quill covered her trestle with oilcloth and sold her specimens anyway. Beetles pinned under glass. A jar of dried fern. And at the back, wrapped in a handkerchief, the little bird skeleton that nobody ever asked about.

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A boy came by on the third wet Saturday, his collar up, a pencil behind one ear. He stopped at the bird and asked what it was called. She read him the card, which was in her father's hand and had gone soft with years of damp. He copied the numbers into his book, then the curve of the beak, then the fronds of fern caught between its ribs.

'It was a bird that wanted to be a beetle,' she said, because the rain was heavy and nobody else was buying. 'It walked the market for a season, sniffing at the fish, and came back with its wings on backwards. So the fern grew up through it to keep it standing.'

He laughed, then didn't. Under his drawing he wrote a number she did not recognise and folded the page into the handkerchief with the bird. The next Saturday the stall was empty except for the oilcloth, and a pale green fern had dried on the wood where the jar used to sit. Marta kept the card. The beetle was still pinned under glass, its wings open, as if it had only been waiting for someone to leave the lid up.