Black and grey tattoo of a praying mantis between quartz crystals and raspberry branches across the chest and upper abdomen.

Praying mantis, crystals and raspberries on torso

Botanical · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A praying mantis with spread wings sits at the centre of the torso, with quartz crystal clusters above and below it. Fruiting raspberry canes and leaves frame both sides, drawn in fine engraved-style linework with stippled shading. Thin dotted geometric lines link the elements, and the design is in black ink and greys on pale skin.

Botanical Geometric Chest Insect Wing Crystal Leaves Foliage Dotted line Geometric line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The raspberry canes have pushed up through the cinder at the back of the field, where nothing was supposed to grow, and you fill a tin with the ripest ones while the generator coughs behind the dodgems. Your nan's trailer sits on blocks beside them, its awning still striped red and white, the paint on its door gone soft with rain. Nobody has bought a ticket for the hook-a-duck in three days. Nobody has bought anything at all.

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Inside, the glass cabinet holds the quartz points she bought from a man in Skegness who swore they had come out of a Welsh mine. They catch the bulb's light and throw it up the walls in small, sharp triangles. On the shelf beside them sits a jam jar with holes punched in its lid, and in it the praying mantis you caught in the hedgerow last August, folded forward as though it is waiting for someone to finish a sentence. You have been feeding it fruit flies and a single raspberry a week, which you know is foolish.

Dell from the waltzer comes to the door on Thursday with the lorry keys in his fist and says the council wants the ground clear by Monday. He looks past you at the jar and says nothing about it. You unscrew the lid. The mantis rises slowly, lifts its forelegs, and opens its wings like a pair of old lace fans, and for one long second the whole cabinet of crystal throws its light across the ceiling at once.

On Monday you walk the field edge with the tin in one hand and the jar in the other. You tip the raspberries into the brambles and let the mantis climb onto a leaf. Behind you the lorries are already rolling, and the crystals wait in your coat pocket, cold against your hip, while the canes bend heavy in the hedge where anyone passing might find them.