Colourful botanical tattoo of a green beetle with purple flowers and leaves on the forearm of a person wearing a dark top.

Beetle and purple flowers on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A green and blue beetle sits among three purple flowers with green leaves and fine curling tendrils. The linework is dark and delicate, with shading in green, purple and yellow that gives a watercolour-like effect. The design runs diagonally across the outer forearm against a blurred dark background.

Botanical Forearm Beetle Insect Flower Leaves Tendril

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Hal, the crate from Penang came off the Lowestoft boat with its lid nailed down by someone who clearly disliked us both, so I spent the morning prising it open with the bread knife. Inside, packed in sawdust and last month's Straits Times, were forty pinned beetles and one jewel-green scarab with the blue sheen on its back that looks wet even when it is dry. The one you asked after.

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I have painted it three times now. The first was too careful, all hard edges, and Mrs Pargeter said it looked like a coin someone had dropped in the harbour. The second I washed too thin, so the wings bled into the paper like a bruise. This morning I let the sea light in through the window and started again with the flowers: three magenta blooms from the climbing hibiscus that Gideon cut off the chandlery wall, their petals still creased from the damp. The leaves went in yellow-green, and then the tendrils, which I drew freehand with a sable brush, curling out into nothing the way bindweed does along the slipway.

The beetle went in last, sitting among the flowers as though it had been invited. I stippled the shell in green and blue, touched the legs with ochre, and when it dried I held the page up to the window. The thing looked so alive that the cat stalked the sill for an hour.

Mr Carrow came in at four wanting a price for a sea chest, saw the page on my table, and asked whether the beetle was for sale too. I said it was promised to the Penang man, who would never see it. He said that was a shame, because it was the only honest thing in the room. Did you ever get the ink from the Sumatran nut? I am sending the sketch in this envelope. Keep it flat.