Colour tattoo of a red heart-shaped ladybird with black spots and curled black antennae on the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Heart-shaped ladybird on a wrist

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A small tattoo of a ladybird with its body shaped like a heart, filled in red with black spots and white highlights. Two black curling antennae rise from the top of the heart, drawn in a thin, even black line. Bold red and black ink fills most of the frame against plain skin.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, the kettle's only just boiled and I'm not telling this twice. You all remember Mr Haskett's register, the brown one with the cracked spine? Nineteen fifty-nine, and the back page was where Joan Pilling drew her bugs. Every one of them a heart. She said ladybirds were Our Lady's beetles, and Our Lady had a soft spot for anything that sat still long enough to be counted.

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Then came the summer Brian Cutler trapped a real one under a jam jar behind the bike sheds and told the whole yard it was dying. Joan knelt in the gravel with her good grey skirt going green at the knees. She didn't cry. She tipped the jar, let the beetle walk onto her finger, and said, you're not a heart, you're a hard-working bit of red, and off it flew over the railings toward the gasworks.

Brian never forgave himself, and Joan never quite forgave him either, which is why they married in 1968 and bickered for fifty years over the seating plan. Hold on, I'm getting ahead of myself. The point is the register. When the school knocked the old block down, I was the one who rescued it from the skip.

Turn to the back page. There, in biro faded to the colour of weak tea, is a heart with spots and two little curls for antennae. Underneath, in her neat hand: Still counting. Joan's gone now, and so has the gasworks, but the bugs keep coming back.

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