Black ink drawing of a cicada with moon phases above and a floral wreath below, in a fine line botanical style, on a pink background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cicada with moon phases and flowers

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed cicada with outstretched veined wings sits centrally, with three moon phases above it, from new to full. A cluster of roses, blooms and leaves forms a wreath beneath the insect. The drawing uses fine black pen linework with cross-hatched shading on the body and no colour beyond the ink, set against a pink paper background.

Fine line Botanical Moon Moon phase Wing Flower Rose Leaves Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cicada came up out of the Wexcombe lane the summer the schoolhouse was pulled down, and nobody in the village could say which of the old girls had let it loose. Mrs Pargeter swore it had been Ada Lusk, who had kept a jar of beetles under her bed for three years. Ada swore she had only ever kept the beetles. They met on the green on the Saturday, twenty-six of them where there had been thirty-one, and they stood about with cups of weak tea while the church clock struck four.

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It was Ruth Dunning who noticed the moons. She had painted the sign for the reunion board, and she had painted three moons on it, new and half and full, because her mother had told her the old women sowed by them. Nobody remembered asking for that. The chalk on the board had gone soft in the rain, and when Ruth looked up from it there was a cicada sitting on the lych gate, wings spread wider than a hand, veins ticked out in ink as fine as hair.

It did not sing. It only waited, the way the dead wait for a name to be said properly. So they said them, one at a time, going down the register in their heads: the boy who drowned at the mill, the teacher who wept over sums, the girl whose roses had won the show two years running and were still in a vase on her sill. When the last name was spoken the cicada lifted and went over the hedge towards the far field, and the three moons on Ruth's board were the same colour as the flowers around the gate.

They finished the tea. Nobody ever asked Ada about the jar again.