Vertical strip of five black line-art flash designs on cream, including a moth with BERN CITY text, a lobster, a beetle and two animal faces, in a monoline geometric style.

Five line-art creature flash designs

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

Five separate tattoo-style designs are stacked vertically on a plain cream background: a winged insect with the words BERN CITY arched above it, a lobster, a symmetrical beetle, and two animal faces. All are drawn in uniform black monoline work with small dots and star-like sparks as filler, and the designs are mirrored for a balanced, ornamental look. The sheet is laid out with generous spacing and no shading or colour.

Geometric Moth Insect Beetle Lion Bear Sparkle Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are kneeling in the bean rows after eleven because the lamp over the potting shed is the only light left in Hollin Lane, and Mrs Okafor's tomatoes have split overnight. A moth the colour of wet slate has landed on the tin rim of your watering can. Across its wings someone has stamped the words BERN CITY, and you laugh at that alone in the dark, because the postmark on the seed packet said the same.

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The seeds came from a man who never gave a surname, only a note in looping pencil: plant what the night brings you, and tend it like a bargain. Under the bean poles a beetle has pressed its horned head into the soil as if listening. Then a lobster, pale and impossible, scuttles sideways out of the compost heap with frost on its claws, though it is July. You do not know whether to be frightened. You kneel and offer it a slug.

Near the back wall, two stone faces have always watched the garden: a lion with dew beaded through his mane, and a bear with his eyes shut. Tonight the lion's eyes are open. He says nothing. The bear only sighs, and the dew on his brow lifts in a spray of small sparks that follow the moth up over the fence.

By dawn the tomatoes are whole again, every split skin sealed with a thread of silver. The lobster has gone from the compost. On the gatepost there is a faint inked stamp of wings, and you press your thumb to it and wait for the bargain to come due.