Neo-traditional tattoo of a large pink flower with green leaves and a green beetle across the back of a hand, with a tattooed forearm above.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink flower and beetle on the hand

Neo-trad · Hand · Colour · Photo

A large pink flower with shaded petals, yellow stamens and a blue and yellow centre fills the back of the hand, with dark green leaves curling from the stem. A green beetle sits to the left of the bloom, and a dark leaf and wisp of pink extend toward the fingers. The bold black outlines and saturated colour are set against pale skin on a white towel.

Neo-trad Botanical Hand Flower Beetle Leaves Peony Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hanna Roe kept the lamp on Scarrow Head for thirty winters, and in all that time the sea never once gave her a quiet night. Each dusk she climbed the iron stair with a tin of paraffin and a wick she had trimmed by feel, because her husband's hands had gone stiff and useless the spring before.

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A green beetle came up the stair with her one autumn, riding the hem of her skirt. It was the colour of wet bottle glass, and it walked the brass rail as though it owned the light. Hanna called it Tam and let it be. Each night it sat on the lamp housing while she worked, and the flame stood straighter when it was there, though she told nobody that, not even the minister.

In the gale month of November the lamp failed. The oil had thickened to tar, the wick had crusted black, and the herring boats were out past the Skerries with their lanterns already guttering. Hanna sat on the cold step with the tin empty beside her. Tam climbed down her sleeve, crossed the wall and walked into the wild peony that grew from a crack in the rock below, where the petals curled open like a bell of rose-coloured silk and the heart shone yellow and blue with pollen.

He came out again slow and gold-dusted, climbed the stone and then the stair, and when Hanna lifted the glass she found the wick had taken a clean bright flame from nothing she could name. The light burned until dawn. The boats came in, all of them. Hanna kept one pink petal pressed in the logbook, and every November after, she left the lantern room door open a crack for Tam.