Insect flash sheet with beetles, moth and wasps

Black and grey · Flash

A flash sheet of seven insects arranged across the page on a pale grey background: two beetles at the top, a death's head hawkmoth with a skull pattern on its thorax, a striped spider, a dragonfly, and two wasps at the bottom. The drawings use fine ink linework with hatching and stippled shading on the wings, bodies and legs. The image is entirely black and grey, with a natural history illustration feel and each insect set apart with generous spacing.

Insect Beetle Moth Skull Spider Dragonfly Flash sheet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The case lay open on my counter at Dover, seven insects pinned to squares of card, and the man on the other side of the glass kept saying they were for his nephew's school project. Nobody's nephew needed a death's head hawkmoth. I turned one card with a gloved finger and read the cramped label beneath: Sainte-Marie, July, taken at night from the lamp of a shuttered bakery.

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The manifest had a box ticked for biological material and a second box for permits, which he had not brought. I counted again. Two beetles, one with jaws like a pair of pliers, the other plain and domed. A striped spider with its legs folded under it like a dropped umbrella. A dragonfly with its wings spread, as if it had been caught mid-escape and had decided to stay. Two wasps, one slender, one heavy in the abdomen.

"My father kept hives in the valley," he said, when I asked about the moth. "That one came every August and screamed at the honey through the wall. Squeaked, like a door." He tapped the glass over its painted skull. "He said it was the only thing that ever frightened the bees more than him."

I should have sent him back to France with the case on his lap. Instead I wrote the moth's name in the margin of my form, stamped the lid with the red circle that meant held for inspection, and watched him walk off toward the coach. Later, filing the paperwork, I found a single wasp wing caught in the corner of the glass, bright as a slip of tissue, and I could not tell which of us it had been left for.