Neo-traditional style tattoo of a beetle held between two outstretched hands with strings, with a pink glow and ribbon below, on a person's stomach above the navel.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Beetle held in hands on stomach

Traditional · Other · Mixed · Photo

A large beetle sits at the centre of the design, held by two outstretched hands with strings running between their fingers and the insect. A pink glow and small radiating marks sit behind the beetle, and a ribbon or banner with a small ornament is placed beneath the hands. Bold black outlines and grey shading define the hands and ribbon, while the beetle's body has orange and red tones.

Traditional Neo-trad Other Beetle Hand String Ribbon Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, that's the one that's been loose since my grandmother's time. Sit where you can see the hedge. Now, the beetle. You'll have heard he was a gift from the wood, but he was never a gift, he was a debt, and Hester Crane paid it with her hands. Every autumn the children of Lower Wending went into the beech wood after blackberries and came out with their feet turned round, the way lost people's feet do. Hester went in after them with a reel of spider silk and a horn lantern.

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She didn't need a light of her own. The beetle lived in the hollow oak where the path forks, and he carried a glow on his back like a coal that won't go out. You could only catch him if you didn't want him. So she sat under the oak with her two hands open on her knees and waited until he crawled onto her palm of his own accord. Then she sang him the names of every child gone missing and tied a thread from each finger to his shell. The strings pulled him where he had to go, pink-lit, walking ahead through the trees, and the children followed the glow home.

The trouble came the winter the miller's boy didn't come back. Hester walked the wood until her fingers bled through the silk, and the beetle, heavy now with all those names, would not climb out of her grip. She found him at last in the hollow, tangled, and he looked up at her with more patience than a thing that small ought to have. That was when she understood the strings ran both ways. Every child she'd led home had left a little of their steps in the thread, and the beetle had been carrying them all.

So she cut the strings, all but one. She kept the thread that ran to the miller's boy, and when the mist came down that night she followed it, and it brought him out of the reeds by his collar. The beetle went dark after that and never glowed again, and Hester wore the cut silk wrapped round her wrist until they buried her. Now, that's enough for one night. Bank the fire, and if you hear something tapping at the shutter, don't you dare open it.