Small fine line ladybird tattoo with red and black fill and a dotted trail, on the foot.

Ladybird with dotted trail on a foot

Fine line · Other · Mixed · Photo

A small ladybird tattoo with a black outline, a red-filled shell and black spots sits on the skin. A trail of tiny dots curls away from it towards the lower left of the frame. The photograph is taken close up against a pale textured surface, with the skin tone and light fairly even.

Fine line Dotwork Other Ladybird Insect Dot Trail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ladybird came aboard at Porthcarrow on the morning the tide turned, riding the rope of my father's crab pot as if it had paid for the passage. I was nine and wanted to flick it over the side. Dad caught my wrist and said a ladybird that climbs onto a boat is one that knows the weather, and the gulls had been shrieking since dawn, so we would keep it in a jam jar on the thwart and see.

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Each day it walked a little way out along the gunwale and back, and where its feet touched the wet paint it left a dot that dried black and stayed. By the fourth week the trail ran from bow to stern like a sentence nobody had finished. Mum said Dad had been reading too many almanacs. Dad said the dots were a tally, and when it reached the end of the rail we would know whether to fish the Hake Bank or turn for home.

The storm came in the second week of October, out of a sky the colour of wet slate. We ran for the harbour mouth with the sea shoving us from behind, and the jar rolled under the seat until I was certain the glass would crack. Tied up under the wall, while rain drummed on the wheelhouse roof, I looked at the trail. The dots had stopped being a line. They had gathered into a spiral that pointed past the lighthouse to a gap in the rocks no boat from Porthcarrow ever used.

On the first clear morning Dad rowed us out to that gap. The ladybird rode on my thumb the whole way, and when we reached the rocks it lifted off and settled on a green buoy, folding its wings like a small red coat being buttoned. Beneath it, wedged in the weed, sat a battered lobster pot with a fresh dot of paint on its lid. Dad laughed until he had to sit down, and I took the pencil from my pocket and marked the final dot on the rail.