Small colour tattoo of a red ladybird with black spots beside a white daisy and black swirling stems, placed on the top of a foot.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ladybird and daisy on a foot

Botanical · Other · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a red ladybird with black spots beside a white daisy with a yellow centre, joined by black curling stems. The linework is bold and clean, and the red, white and yellow fills sit on top of the black outlines. The small design sits on the foot against a plain, softly lit skin background.

Botanical Other Ladybird Daisy Flower Stem Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost has held the yard since Boxing Day, so when you see a daisy by the gate in February you assume you are seeing things. Your Uncle Walter laughs from the milking parlour door. "Nothing flowers this time of year," he says, but you have already knelt in the muck, where a single white bloom stands no taller than a thimble, its yellow eye turned toward the thin sun.

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Beside it, on a black stem that curls like a question mark, a ladybird is crawling with the slowness of something woken too early. It should be asleep in a crack of the barn wall, the way your nan says they sleep through the cold. You cup your hands around it and carry it up the lane to the kitchen, where the range is lit and the window has run with steam.

Nan sits at the table with her tea gone cold. She watches the ladybird walk across your palm and does not tell you it is foolish. "They wake when the days start leaning longer," she says. "Somebody has to go first, or nobody believes spring is coming." You stand the daisy in a jam jar on the windowsill, and the ladybird climbs onto a petal, lifting its red wings once to test the warmth.

By morning the petals are bare and the sill is furred with frost. The ladybird has walked to the glass and sits in the only patch the sun has reached, red against the white, as if it had only been waiting for someone to ask it to start.