Black and grey flash design of a beetle, an eye in a triangle and engraved flowers, arranged symmetrically within thin geometric circles and lines.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Beetle, eye and flowers in a geometric design

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical design with engraved flowers at the top, a central beetle with detailed wings and legs, and a stippled eye inside a triangle at the base. Thin black lines form circles, a triangle and a vertical axis that link the motifs together. The shading is built from fine dots and hatching in greys on a plain pale background.

Geometric Botanical Dotwork Beetle Eye Triangle Flower Circle Geometric line Hexagon

Find an artist for this

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

My dear Tobias, the plates have come back from the printer in Leiden and I am ashamed to say the beetle is wrong again. He has given it the wings of a moth, soft as cloth, when I drew them stiff and scaled like a lacquered shield. I stood over the proofs until the lamp guttered, and still I could not make him see that the creature must look as though it had been dug from the earth on purpose.

Keep reading

The tulips were easier. Margaret sent up a bunch from the glasshouse before the frost, the outer petals already gone brown at the edges, and I engraved every one of them with the point while she held the vase. You will laugh, but I think the flowers are the only honest thing on the sheet. Everything beneath them is measured: the two circles, the triangle that fits inside the larger circle like a key in a lock, the thin line that runs down from the top and does not bend once.

The eye at the foot I have not told anyone about. The stippling took me nine evenings, a dot for every breath I could manage without shaking, and when the last one went in the pupil seemed to look back up the page at me. Margaret says that is nonsense and I have not argued. I only ask that you do not let the printer touch it with his burnisher.

If the new plates come right, I will send you a proof with the hexagon at the bottom, the one stone I could not decide the weight of. Burn this letter after you read it, as usual, and do not tell the printer what I have said about his moths.