Black and grey realism tattoo of a horned beetle with spread wings inside a fine line diamond frame on the forearm.

Horned beetle in a geometric frame on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A horned beetle with spread wings sits at the centre of the design, drawn with detailed shading on its shell and fine hatched lines on its wings. Thin black diamond and triangle outlines, a dotted circle and single dots frame the insect. The photograph is taken from the side of the forearm, with the tattoo filling most of the frame against a pale skin tone and a blurred dark background.

Geometric Realism Forearm Beetle Wing Diamond Triangle Dot Dotted circle Insect

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the beetle in the proving drawer at twenty to four, when the flour still smells of yesterday's rye and the radio in the corner is murmuring about the motorway closures. It is the size of a thumbnail, horned like a tiny stag, and it has walked across the dough you shaped at midnight without leaving a mark. Mrs Okafor, who has run the ovens at Pell Street since before you were born, says beetles like the warm and the dark, and that you should not be squeamish about a visitor who arrived before you did.

Keep reading

You carry it out on a flour scoop to the yard, where the bins sit under a sodium lamp and the sky is still the colour of wet slate. The beetle opens its wing cases, unfolds the clear fans beneath them, and for a moment you think it will simply lift over the rooftops toward the canal. Instead it turns and climbs the scoop's handle, patient as a clock hand, pausing at each bead of dew on the metal as though counting them.

Back inside, the first loaves are going in. You slash the tops with a razor, quick and shallow, and each cut opens like a small door. Across the road the lights of the Co-op flick off one by one, and somebody on the early bus is reading aloud from a paper that nobody will finish.

When the sun finally pushes its thin edge over the car park, you notice the beetle has gone and the scoop is clean. On the flour sack where it stood, there is a single row of six small prints, spaced as evenly as a compass draws a circle. You bake the last tray without looking at them, and you do not sweep the sack.