Flash-style drawing of four coloured beetles playing instruments on an aged parchment background, including a sunburst guitar, a drum kit, a Union Jack beetle and a bass guitar.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four beetles playing guitars and drums

Colour · Flash

Four beetles are drawn in fine detailed linework, each playing a different instrument: a sunburst electric guitar, a drum held aloft, a bass guitar and a black guitar. One beetle has a Union Jack pattern on its shell and another has a stag-beetle head. The shading is cross-hatched and the colours are muted tones of brown, red, blue and yellow, set on a sepia parchment-style background arranged in a four-up sheet.

Beetle Guitar Insect Music

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You hear them before you find the pub. The bass comes up through the cobbles of Sheaf Lane, a low hum the gutter picks up and carries past the bins, and by the time you reach the cellar door the drummer is already counting in. A bill chalked on the wall in the curly hand of a fishmonger reads THE SCARAB SOCIETY, ONE NIGHT ONLY. The doorman is a woodlouse who asks for nothing but your coat and your name.

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Inside it is all brass and sawdust. Mr Lucanus, the stag beetle, bends over a black guitar with his antlers grazing the beams, picking the slow numbers the way other men pray. Above the crowd the drum hangs on a pair of thin legs, sticks raised, while the bass player, round as a conker and polished like a fiddle, rolls his shoulders and nods at you as though you owe him money. Nobody here is a pest. Nobody sprays anybody.

Between sets the drummer climbs down, one wing-case chipped, and asks you to hold his sticks while he checks the lamp above the stage. It is a street lamp, wired in, and the light through the cellar window is the same amber as the one that used to stand outside the chip shop. He tells you the Society last played the city the winter the lamps went out for good, and they have been moving on every night since, following whatever light is left.

They start the last number. The room dims to sepia, then to the brown of old varnish, and you notice the ceiling has come lower, the walls have gone thin and crosshatched, and your own hands look like something pinned to card. The beetles turn towards you in unison. Mr Lucanus lifts his antlers, the bass lifts a single finger, and the drummer raises his sticks, waiting for you to clap.