Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a horned beetle with spread wings on the upper thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Horned beetle on the thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A horned beetle with its wings spread sits centred on the outer thigh. The insect is drawn in fine black linework with stippled dot shading on the body and wing veins. The image is black and grey, set against a black and white patterned skirt and pale skin.

Dotwork Thigh Beetle Insect Wing Horn

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

The beetle had already eaten the Chancellor's wax seal by the time you found it under the north bridge, its great horn raised like a sceptre and its wings spread wide to dry in the rain. Hallowmere's soldiers were three streets behind you, and the clerk's boy was crying somewhere near the granary, because the Chancellor had promised him a silver penny for every beetle he delivered to the palace.

Keep reading

Your grandmother had told you, the winter before she died, that a horned beetle would carry any debt out of the kingdom if you fed it honey and told it the truth. You had laughed at her. You are not laughing now, with the creature warm and heavy in your cupped hands and the whole town's ledgers stacked in the Chancellor's tower like firewood. Every name in those books is a debt, and every debt is a cord tied round someone's ankle.

So you tell it the truth. You tell it about the miller who paid the tithe with his daughter's wedding cloth, about the widow whose roof is held up by an unpaid note, about the Chancellor himself, who borrowed from everyone and paid no one. The beetle listens with its clubbed antennae turned towards you, as though it has heard all of this before, and then it unfolds its wings with a sound like a letter being opened.

You carry it to the parapet at dawn and set it on the cold stone. It climbs to the edge, considers the river for a long moment, and goes. The ledgers in the tower do not burn. They simply go blank, page by page, and when the clerks come down at nine to find their columns empty, the bells of Hallowmere ring a different hour, and nobody can say what the town owes anymore.