Black ink drawing of a tattoo design showing a ribcage, pelvis and winged insect with a flower and leaves, drawn in fine linework with no body placement shown.

Ribcage, pelvis and insect design

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a skeletal ribcage and pelvis stacked vertically, with a winged insect, likely a grasshopper, sitting between them. A flower with layered petals and several leaves and stems sits on the left side of the ribcage. The work uses fine hatched and stippled linework in black ink on pale paper, with no colour.

Realism Botanical Ribcage Skeleton Insect Wing Flower Leaves Bone

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every autumn Agnes Tull walked the forest path at the edge of Hollin Edge with a basket of marigolds, because the old people said the dead liked something bright to lie among, and the living should be given the same courtesy. She had buried three husbands and a son. She still kept their bones in a chest under the stairs, cleaned and wired, waiting until she could be certain which bone had belonged to whom.

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One dry August a grasshopper came in through her window and would not leave. It sat on the mantel beside the wired ribs and sang at them until the dust on the bones seemed to shiver. Agnes talked to it the way she talked to the kettle. "You want something," she said. The grasshopper turned its head, first one eye and then the other, and she understood that it wanted the chest opened.

She opened it. The grasshopper went in among the pelvis and the ribs and sat quiet for a long while. When it came out its wings were folded like a fan, and a single crumpled marigold petal lay where the hip bone had been. Agnes understood then what the forest had been asking all summer, which was for someone to carry the heat out of the house before the frost came. She took the bones in her apron, walked the path to the place where the bracken met the trees, and laid them down in a ring with the flowers.

By morning the chest under the stairs was empty. Agnes did not go looking for the bones. The men who cut the ferns that week said there were marigolds growing in a ring at the edge of the trees, though nobody had planted them, and that on still evenings you could hear a grasshopper singing somewhere inside the ring, quietly, as if it had been asked to keep count.