Small black fine line cicada tattoo with dotwork shading on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Cicada tattoo on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A small cicada or similar winged insect is tattooed on the upper back beside the shoulder blade, shown with its wings open and body in profile. The linework is fine and dark, with stippled dotwork shading in the wing panels and body. The ink is black and grey, set against pale skin, and a faded grey tattoo is partly visible at the upper left edge of the frame.

Fine line Dotwork Back Insect Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cicadas had started before the ferry came in, a wall of noise rising off the olive terraces until the harbour wall seemed to hum with it. Maria Kalogeri stood on the quay with a paper bag of husks she had picked from the bark of the fig trees, and she was glad to have been up since five. Her grandfather used to say the husks were the only honest thing the island made, because they showed you exactly where something had been and left nothing else behind.

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The summer she was nine, he took her up the goat track to a ridge where the thyme grew low and the noise was so loud it buzzed in your teeth. "Seventeen years under the ground," he said, lifting a husk from a pine trunk with two fingers, "sucking at roots in the dark, and then one night it climbs out, splits its back and walks away from its own skin." He turned the shell to the light. Every vein in the wing was still there, every fine ridge, as if someone had drawn it with the point of a pin.

The winter after he died, she heard not a single cicada. The terraces went grey and the wind came straight up from the sea. She tipped the bag onto the kitchen table and sorted the husks by size the way he had taught her, until she found the one with the torn wing, the one he had always called hers because she was the one who spotted it. She held it up to the window, and the winter light came through the veins.

In spring she pinned it above the door, body still curled, wings open like a small hand reaching for the sun. The first cicada of the year started up in the fig tree just as the ferry horn sounded, and she did not go down to the quay. She stood at the window and let the noise fill the room, and for once she did not count the seconds until it stopped.