Enlarged with AI from a smaller original
Cicada drawing on kraft paper
Black and grey · Flash
A top-down drawing of a cicada with both pairs of wings spread open and its head, thorax and segmented abdomen shown in detail. The linework is fine and precise, with the wing veins drawn as delicate lines and the body shaded with hatching and solid black areas. The design is set in black and grey on a plain tan background, centred in the frame.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
You want to know why the station clock at Harrowdene stopped at twenty past three, and I'll tell you, but you'll have to sit still for it, the way the men did on the bench under the canopy when the summer was too hot for talking. It was the year the cicadas came up out of the ground in their thousands, every hedge humming like a telegraph wire. Old Mrs Pyke ran the refreshment room then, and she swore the noise got into the milk.
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A young porter named Tom Garside had taken a fancy to the signalman's daughter, a girl called Edie who wore her hair pinned up with a brass grip shaped like a wing. He kept a cicada husk in his waistcoat pocket, a brown empty shell he'd found clinging to the fence post, for luck. Edie laughed at him for it. She said the husk was only what the insect left behind when it had finished with the ground and wanted to be in the air.
On the last Saturday of July the storm came over the downs and the Leeds train was held at the junction for forty minutes. When the signal finally dropped, Tom ran the length of the platform to find Edie, and found her instead standing under the clock with her grip in her hand, the wing snapped clean through. He never asked her why. He just pressed the husk into her palm, and the clock stopped, and nobody has wound it since.
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