Enlarged with AI from a smaller original
Beetle and crescent moon sketch
Black and grey · Flash
A pencil drawing of a horned beetle seen from a three-quarter angle, with its wings partly spread and legs extended. A large crescent moon arcs behind it, with a circular outline framing the insect. The work uses fine, sketchy linework and light cross-hatched shading on cream paper, with a pencil lying across the top of the sheet.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The moon came down into the bay at Corrach the winter the herring failed, and it lay in the shallows like a bent silver oar. Nobody on the island would go near it. Old Ruaidhri said it would take a man's shadow if he looked at it too long.
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Only the beetle was not afraid. It was a stag beetle with a horn like a forked piece of driftwood, and it lived under the peat behind the kirk. Each evening it climbed out, set its broad back against the rim of the moon, and pushed it a little way up the slope of the sky. Then it slept in the heather while the moon rested. The children laughed at it. The beetle did not mind.
One night the beetle was late. The bay was black, the moon had slid back into the sea, and Ruaidhri's granddaughter Isla found the insect on the shore with its legs stuck in the wet sand. She carried it up the path in her cupped hands, its wings buzzing against her palms, and set it against the crescent where the moon had fallen. The moon lifted. Its light came up the bay like the tide.
After that the islanders left a little dry peat by the kirk wall for the beetle, and nobody on Corrach ever again said the moon was too heavy to lift. They only said the beetle was tired, and that was why the nights grew short in summer.
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