Black ink drawing of an ornately patterned insect with lace-like wings inside a circular mandala border, a design suited to fine line tattooing.

Ornate insect inside a circle frame

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed pen drawing of an insect with intricately patterned, lace-like wings and a slender segmented body, set diagonally across a circular frame. The frame is filled with repeating scalloped and dotted mandala motifs. The work is done in fine black linework with dense hatching and stippling on a plain cream background, with no shading in grey or colour.

Fine line Geometric Insect Wing Mandala Circle Pattern Lace Dot

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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

Keep your hands still, girl, or the bobbins will tangle. Mrs Orrin's lace never snapped in sixty years of lacemaking on Pennick Quay, and it won't snap for you while I'm talking. Now. The mantis came in on the Mary Dunmore, folded in a coil of tarred rope, its green gone brown with salt. Nobody saw it climb aboard. Old Tobias swore it had been watching him from the hawser for three days before he ever touched the rope.

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Mrs Orrin took it home in a jam jar. She had no use for a bug, but she had her mother's pattern book, and every page was ringed with the same round frame, scallops and dots pricked out in ink like the moon going through its phases. She set the mantis inside one of those circles and copied it stroke by stroke, wing by wing, until the veins were fine as cotton and the segmented body looked hammered out of pewter.

The harbourmaster came by to ask what the drawing was for. She said a collar for the chapel, and he laughed, and she said no more. That winter the nets came home empty and the fish went out past the breakwater, and the women of Pennick said the insect had crawled into the paper and was hunting for the sea. Mrs Orrin kept stitching. Every collar she made had a small mantis worked into one corner, and every boat that carried one came home full.

So when you see the lace on the chapel wall, look for the one with the raised fold at its heart. That is her hand. And if the tide turns strange on a still morning, don't trouble yourself. It is only the mantis turning its head to see whether the men are coming home. Now pass me that spool, and mind the pins.