Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a beetle with red crystal clusters on its back, set over a blue and orange circle with a black ring and dotted lines, on a lower limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crystal beetle over a two-tone circle

Neo-trad · Other · Colour · Photo

A beetle with a pale, spotted body and red crystal clusters growing across its back sits over a split circle shaded from blue to orange-red. Below it, a black ring and a set of thin dotted lines link small red and black dots in a loose geometric arrangement. The bold colour and clean outlines are set against a softly blurred background of a car and pavement.

Neo-trad Fine line Other Beetle Crystal Circle Ring Dot Dotted line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The beetle came up out of the lead workings at Ashby Hollow the spring the dance hall burned, carrying on its back a cluster of red stones that nobody in the village had seen before. Old Maud Penrose swore it was the same beetle that had walked across the ballroom floor in 1902, when the boards were still pine and the fiddlers played from a gallery above the door.

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Tom Heeley wanted the stones. He lay on the cold ash with a candle and watched the crystals catch the light, and each time the flame moved, the beetle moved with it, stepping always onto the black ring of the old iron hoop that had once held the hall's lamp. Tom followed it through the char for three nights. On the third, the beetle led him along a line of chalk dots the dancers had left years before to mark their steps, and the dots ran out at a wall where someone had painted a split circle, blue on one half and the colour of a dying coal on the other.

He put his hand flat against the plaster and felt the paint give a little, like skin over a warm stone. The beetle climbed onto his palm. It weighed no more than a dropped button, and the stones were cold, but when he turned his hand the light off the red points ran across the wall in thin dotted lines, drawing a map he did not understand.

He carried it back to the shaft at dawn and set it down among the spoil. The village built a new hall that autumn with a floor of salvaged oak, and on wet nights the fiddlers still play in it. Maud says that if you step carefully along the boards, you can feel the small dots of chalk under your feet, and that whenever somebody dances the right way, a beetle somewhere underground turns over and sets its stones to glowing.