Black ink line drawing of a cicada at the centre of a geometric star and circle, surrounded by five flowers, a tattoo design with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cicada and flowers in a geometric circle

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A cicada sits at the centre of a geometric star framed by a large circle and dashed inner circle. Five flowers are arranged around the edge: a pansy at the top, a rose at the right, a lily at the bottom left, a hibiscus-style bloom at the bottom right and another open flower at the left. The fine black linework uses stippled shading on the wings, petals and body, on a plain white background.

Geometric Botanical Pansy Rose Lily Hibiscus Flower Circle Star Geometric line Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, and mind the hollyhocks, they bruise if you lean on them. My grandmother's grandmother kept a plot behind the chapel wall at Little Kersey, and she had one rule about it: every bed was laid out with string and a brass compass before a single seed went in. Her husband thought this foolish. He did not think so the summer the ground began to hum.

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The hum came up through the soil for a week in June, low and steady, like a kettle left on the far side of a wall. Nobody could find where it started. The girl who did the weeding, Winifred, put her ear to the lime-ringed circle one evening and heard it answer her. She had been born the same spring the thing went under, and she had been told it would take seventeen years to climb out again. Seventeen years is a long time to be patient about a bug.

So she did what her grandmother would have done and tended the flowers around the ring. She set the pansy at the top, where it could watch the gate, the rose on the right, the lily low on the left, and the hibiscus and the open bloom between them, each one in its place on the line. On the morning the cicada finally split its brown back on the centre of the star, every petal was already turned towards it. It sat drying its wings in the sun, and the whole garden went quiet to listen.

When Winifred bent to lift it, the old man's voice came from the gate. Leave it, he said. It is only changing its coat. Some things we draw a circle round so they know where home is. She left it. By evening the wings were clear as isinglass and the shell lay on the star's point, empty and perfect, and she put it in her apron pocket to keep the summer.