Colourful neo-traditional grasshopper tattoo with a purple flower on the side of a ribcage, with bold black outlines.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Colourful grasshopper and flower on the ribs

Neo-trad · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A grasshopper with teal body, red eyes and translucent wings perches on a large purple flower with petals below it. The linework is bold and black, with dotted detail along the wings and body. Warm reds and oranges in the wings contrast with cool teal and violet tones across the design.

Neo-trad Botanical Ribs Insect Flower Petal Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had been told twice by the prior that the grasshopper was a nuisance, and twice he had carried it from the lettuces back to the garden wall without mentioning it to anyone. This morning it had climbed the stem of the great purple cranesbill beside the cloister door and settled on the topmost bloom as if the flower had been planted for it alone. Its wings lay folded along its back, but when the sun found them they showed rose and amber, thin as the vellum in the scriptorium.

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He had kept this garden for thirty-one years and had never once been asked what the insects wanted. Bees, he could tell you. Snails, certainly. But a grasshopper with red eyes like a cardinal's buttons, sitting so still that he could see the dotted pearls along its teal body catch the light, was a different matter. "You're in the wrong bed," he told it, and it did not argue.

Novice Tobias came running across the herb beds with his habit hitched up, saying the abbot was on the stairs and wanted cut flowers for the infirmary altar. Anselm reached for his shears. The grasshopper did not leap. It stepped onto the back of his hand, light as a thought, and rode with him down the path while he cut the cranesbill and carried it in.

The old brother in the infirmary bed had asked for colour, only colour, for three days. When Anselm set the jug on the sill, the grasshopper climbed off his sleeve and onto the windowpane, where the afternoon came through its wings and threw a red shadow across the sheet. The old man laughed quietly and said God had a sense of humour after all. Anselm let him have the last word, and did not move the insect.