Black and grey fine line tattoo of a cicada with outstretched veined wings on the inner forearm.

Cicada tattoo on the inner forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A cicada with spread, veined wings is drawn in black linework on the inner forearm of a pale-skinned arm. The body is shaded with fine stippling and hatching along the segmented abdomen, with the head and legs outlined in thin strokes. The insect sits centrally against a plain white background, with a small mole visible above it.

Fine line Forearm Insect Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The summer the rain stopped at Haddon Wells, the cicadas came up out of the dry ground by the thousand, and old Mabel Strand said they were the souls of the drowned coming back to ask for water. Her grandson Teodor did not believe it. He was nine and believed only in things he could catch. So he filled a jam jar with well water and carried it out along the desert road to the place where the tar had gone soft and the stones were bright as coins, because the old woman had said the cicadas there were the thirstiest.

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He found one clinging to a fence post, its wings held flat and veined like window glass, its body striped the way a pine trunk is striped. He held the jar up to it. The insect did not move. It only turned its small head toward him as if it had been waiting all year for someone to notice.

Teodor set the jar down on the road and waited. When the heat lifted off the tarmac in shaking sheets, a girl came walking up from the far end of the road, carrying a bucket and a dented tin cup. She had no shoes and her hair was full of dust. She drank from the cup, looked at the jar, and said, "You can have the next one. This one is mine." Then she tipped the bucket over the fence post, and the water ran down into the dry earth without a sound, and the cicada lifted off and went north over the wells without looking back.