Small red and black tattoo of a beetle-like motif with curled black antennae and black dots, on the upper back below a white strap.

Red and black beetle on upper back

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The tattoo shows a stylised beetle or ladybird outline in red, with a red spiral at the head, two black curled antennae above and small black teardrop shapes around the body. Black dots sit inside the red oval body, with a single red line dividing it down the middle. The lines are clean and even, with no shading, and the tattoo sits near the centre of the frame on pale skin.

Back Beetle Ladybird Spiral Dot Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Tremarrow Bottom believed the beetle was lucky until the winter the north shaft flooded. My grandfather used to say it was Old Enna's doing, the red-backed thing that crawled out from under the slate tips every spring when the frost lifted. Children caught them in jam jars and let them go again before supper, because you never kept a ladybird past the day you named it.

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That winter a boy called Owen Pascoe went down with the morning shift and did not come up at the bell. The water came in sideways through the old adit, black and fast, and the men stood at the pit head with their caps in their hands. Mrs Pascoe sat on an upturned bucket and would not be moved. Then a red spot came crawling over her shoe, and she laughed, the first laugh anyone had heard from her in a week, and said Owen always carried one in his tin for luck.

They found the tin in his coat on the hook by the lamp room. Inside was a beetle drawn on a scrap of paper, red oval, black dots, a curl at the head like a question mark, and two black antennae curling up as if it were listening. Nobody could say who had drawn it. The overman swore it was not there the week before. They sent the paper down the shaft on a length of cord, and it came back wet but whole, dotted with mud, and when they hauled it up again the boy was holding the other end.

He never went down the north shaft again. He took up carpentry instead, and every bell he rang on the chapel tower he counted under his breath, one dot for each man who had come home.