Close crop of a woman's chest showing a metallic gold winged scarab beetle design, which looks like a temporary tattoo, above a plunging multicoloured dress.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Gold winged scarab on a chest

Chest · Colour · Photo

A cropped photograph of a woman's upper chest, with the face out of frame. A large gold metallic winged scarab beetle sits at the centre of the chest, with outspread wings and detailed engraved lines, and it appears to be a temporary or metallic transfer rather than ink. The background is a jewelled, multicoloured patterned dress with a deep V neckline, and the warm, soft lighting makes the gold stand out.

Chest Beetle Wing Gold Metallic

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pass me that ladle, lad, and mind the pot, for the stew won't wait on my tale any more than the sea waits on a man. You'll want to know why the cook on the Halcyon Mary kept a gold beetle in his waistcoat pocket, so I'll tell you.

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Tobias Winn won it in Port Said from a dealer with one eye and a silk scarf, lost a whole week's wages to him at cards, and got the beetle back as a joke. It was beaten gold, no bigger than a walnut, with its wings spread out like a pair of sails and every feather of them scored with fine lines. The dealer swore it carried the sun through the underworld each night, and that any sailor who wore it would never be lost at sea. Tobias laughed at him and put it in his pocket anyway, because gold is gold and a cook learns to keep his coin close.

Then came the squall off Finisterre, when the galley stove flew off its bolts and the whole forward companionway filled with black smoke. Tobias could not see his own hands. But the lamp caught those wings through the murk, and he followed the glint of them along the bulkhead to the hatch, and he got the boy Ned up through it before the fat ran alight. He said the gold was warm when he took it out after, and I've never known whether he was telling the truth or wanting to.

The wings were bent in the fall, flattened near the tips, and the dealer's sun never did come up out of that beetle. Still, it sits now in the biscuit tin with the spoons, its wings bent just enough to hold the lamplight, which is all a beetle ever asked of us. Now stir, boy, and stop listening to the old fool.