Four black line drawings of stylised beetles stacked vertically on a cream background, in a fine line and geometric flash style with dot and star accents.

Four stylised beetles in black line

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows four stacked beetle designs, each drawn in black monoline with a symmetrical, geometric body and small dots and star-shaped marks scattered around them. The beetles differ in shape: the top one has a shield-like carapace, the second has a horned head, and the lower two have more elongated bodies and spiky legs. The drawings sit on a plain cream background with generous spacing between them.

Fine line Geometric Beetle Insect Star Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody had seen Mr Pryce since the year the science block flooded, so when he shuffled into the function room of the Crown with a carrier bag knocking against his knee, the whole table went quiet. He sat down beside me without asking, lifted a shoebox from the bag and took off the lid. Inside, on cotton wool gone the colour of weak tea, lay four beetles under little squares of glass, arranged like a row of brooches.

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We had found them the summer we were twelve, under the stones behind the allotments on Bramley Road. Pryce had let us keep them on one condition: we write down where each one came from, on a card tucked under the glass. Kathryn Dunn had lost her cards. Gareth Lloyd had written his on the back of a bus ticket and swore it was still in his wallet, though he never once produced it. I had kept mine, and I still could not believe I had.

Pryce tapped the glass over the horned one. "You called that one Bishop," he said. "Gareth called the spiky one Spider, and nobody could agree on the shield-backed one, so it was just Shield." He pointed to the gap at the far end of the cotton wool, a neat oval with nothing in it. "And that's the fourth. Never named it. Never found a card for it either."

I reached into my coat and found the bus ticket folded small in the lining, where I must have put it years ago. On the back, in Gareth's careful capitals, it said: UNDER THE WALL, JULY, STARS OUT. IT RAN FOR THE DRAIN. I passed it to Pryce. He read it twice, then laughed, and the laugh turned into something that sounded a lot like relief. "Well," he said, closing the lid, "at least one of us was honest about it."