Colour tattoo of a ladybird with red wings, black spots and curled antennae, shaded to look glossy and three-dimensional.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ladybird tattoo on skin

Mixed · Photo

A ladybird with red wing cases, black spots and a black head with curled antennae, shown in close view on skin. The shading uses soft gradients and white highlights to give the insect a rounded, glossy look. Red and black ink dominate the image against a plain, darker background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp-room door at Shelf Pit hangs open on its one good hinge, and the ladybird has walked the length of your coat sleeve while you argued with the banksman about the cage. Your grandmother always said a ladybird that lands on a man going underground will bring him back up the same shaft. You have never believed her. Still, you cup it in your palm and feel its legs tickle, red as the brick of the wash-house.

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The cage drops. Nobody speaks on the way down except Tom Garside, who counts the seconds aloud as he always does, and you open your fingers just enough to let the little creature see the dark. In the roadway the air is thick with dust and the lamps throw yellow circles on wet rock. Then a crack like a rifle echoes from the east face, and the lamps go out one after another.

Now there is only breathing, a cough, and the tick of cooling metal. Something moves against your knuckles. The ladybird opens its red wing cases and lifts, and you follow it by feel, one hand on the rib of the roadway, toward a thin grey draught that the insect seems to know better than you do. It climbs the shaft rope ahead of you, a slow line of red you can only sense rather than see.

At the top the morning is the colour of skimmed milk, and the ladybird settles on your wrist with its black spots bright as the day it hatched. The banksman is calling names. Yours comes second. You do not tell him what you carried up. You keep your hand perfectly still so it can finish the climb in its own time.

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From the plentytattoo archive, uploaded by a user. Is this your work? Ask for credit or removal.