Black and grey flash drawing of a black widow spider with a small red hourglass marking, sitting in a corner spider web.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black widow spider in a web

Black and grey · Flash

A black widow spider sits near the centre of a corner spider web, drawn on a plain white background. The web uses clean, dark outlines with soft grey shading along the curved strands, and the spider's body is solid black with a small red hourglass marking. The composition is open, with the web spreading diagonally from the top right to the lower left.

Spider Web

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dearest Hettie, the post coach left me at the top of Cwm Dulas on Tuesday, and I have been living in the old toll house ever since, which you will say is exactly the sort of foolish thing I do. The keeper's widow sold me a cracked jug and a bed with a rope frame, and told me the mountain pass has always been a place where things get caught. I laughed. I am not laughing now.

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The window of my room looks onto the corner of the gorge, where three roads meet and the wind pulls everything in. Every morning there is a web strung across that corner, larger than any I have seen, its spokes fanned out from the stone posts to the rowan trunk like the ribs of an umbrella. Dew sits on every thread. In the middle of it sits a black widow, glossy as a boot, with one red mark on her belly shaped like a little hourglass. She never moves when I look at her. She only seems to be waiting for the carriages.

Yesterday a drover came up the north road with six sheep and a dog, and the dog went straight for the web's lower edge. I shouted. The drover did not turn his head. Only when the animals were past the corner did I see that the threads had gone slack and the spider had drawn them back in neat as a sailor coiling rope. Nothing had been caught. I have decided that is the worst part.

I am writing to ask you to come, Hettie, bring the good scissors and your sister's husband, who is not afraid of anything. We will cut the thing down together and burn the posts. If it grows back by Sunday, I will take the next coach home and never mention mountains again. Your loving sister, Clara.