Small colour tattoo of a red ladybird on a sprig of red flowers and green leaves, botanical style, on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ladybird and red flower sprig on a wrist

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A small tattoo shows a red ladybird with black spots and a dark head, sitting on a curving sprig of tiny red flowers with green leaves. The linework is soft and the shading is gentle, giving the insect a slightly painterly, rounded look. Colour is applied in reds, greens and dark blue-black on pale skin, and the design sits off-centre against a plain light background.

Botanical Forearm Ladybird Flower Sprig Leaves Berry

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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 village hall still smells of floor polish and squash, and I stand by the trestle table pretending to read name badges. Mrs Ferriby's old handwriting on mine says 'Nell Ashdown, Form 4B'. Across the room Gwen Pryce is laughing with the same wide mouth she had at eleven, when she swore a ladybird had told her which boy liked her.

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We were nine on the bus to Marlow Common, the summer the hawthorn hedges went heavy with red berries. Gwen cupped a seven-spotted ladybird in her palm and carried it all the way to the tip of a sprig she had snapped from the verge. 'It has to go up,' she said. 'If it flies off the top, the wish comes true.' We waited by the stile for an hour while it crawled, stopped, cleaned its legs, and crawled again.

Now Gwen crosses the hall with a paper cup of wine and sits beside me without asking. She pushes back her cardigan sleeve to show me the little red thing she had put on herself years later, a ladybird on a curl of tiny flowers, softened at the edges the way old things go. 'Took me ages to find someone who could draw it without making it look cross,' she says. I tell her about the stile. She doesn't remember the wish, only the cold of the verge and a tractor grinding somewhere past the wood.

When the lights go up for the raffle, a ladybird lands on the back of my hand, sure as anything, and begins its slow walk towards my cuff. Gwen laughs and says, 'Well, one of us is getting out of here.' I carry it to the open door and let it go, and it lifts into the car park light before I can decide whether I wished for anything at all.