Black and grey dotwork and geometric tattoo on an upper arm showing a large beetle with a crescent moon, crystal, ferns and flowers within triangle lines.

Beetle, crescent moon and crystal on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large beetle sits at the centre of this black and grey tattoo, with a crescent moon above, a pair of antler-like shapes above the beetle, and a small crystal below. Fine stippled dots and thin linework form triangles and circles around the motifs, with ferns, flower stems and a twig along the sides and base. The design wraps the upper arm and is shown against a wooden fence and greenery.

Dotwork Geometric Botanical Upper arm Beetle Crescent moon Crystal Antler Fern Flower Twig Triangle Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cabinet came to me in a tea chest, its drawers rattling like loose teeth, and the first thing I did was count the beetles. Forty-one Goliaths, pinned in neat rows, each labelled in Mr Ashdown's cramped copperplate. Forty-two, I told the carrier, because the third drawer had a gap where something had been lifted out and the pin left behind.

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Ashdown kept a ledger beside his specimens. Each entry gave a date, a moon phase sketched in pencil, and a note on where he had found the beetle: under bark on the Sheffield road, in a fern-choked ditch, on a stone the size of a fist. The last entry had no beetle at all, only a drawing of a crystal and two curved horns above a triangle he had ruled twice over, and the words *she is not finished with me*.

I went looking for the forty-second in the garden he had let go to nettles. Beneath the fence, where the ferns had gone to rust, I found a hollow stone with a crystal set in its heart, and beside it a beetle as broad as my palm, still whole, its wing cases glossed like wet slate. I did not pin it. I sat on the cold step until the moon came up thin over the shed roof, then I set the beetle on the stone and left them to each other.

In the morning the drawer was still empty. I wrote one more line in the ledger, in my own careless hand: forty-two, returned to the ground, moon waning.