Black and grey fine line tattoo of a winged scarab beetle beneath a crescent moon and a row of moon phases, on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Scarab beetle with moon phases on a calf

Fine line · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A winged scarab beetle sits at the centre of the design, with a crescent moon above its head and a semicircle of moon phases arching over it. The linework is fine and even, with soft grey shading on the wings and the beetle's body. The tattoo is shown head-on against a plain pale background, with the design filling most of the frame.

Fine line Calf Beetle Moon Moon phase Wing Crescent

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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

Sit down, the lot of you, the urn's only just gone on and I have never once got to the end of this before it runs dry. Forty years and you still talk through the good bits. Right. Once the moon was a wheel, and every night a beetle called Sef rolled it up out of the river mud and across the sky, the same way your dad used to drag the bins to the kerb on a Tuesday, grumbling the whole way.

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The trouble was the wheel wore thin. Each night Sef pushed it a little less round, shaving the edges on the stars, until one evening there was only a sliver left, a fingernail of light no bigger than a bent pin. Sef sat in the reeds with its six legs folded and its wings held out like a pair of washing lines, and it wept river water, which is how the reed-cutters' daughters learned that beetles can weep at all.

Nell Harker, who had a potter's wheel in her dad's back shed and no patience for anybody's sulking, carried down a sack of wet clay. She shaped a new moon in her palms, thumbed it smooth, and fired it in the kiln until it rang like a bell when you tapped it. Sef rolled it up that night, and the next, and the one after that, and the sky went round and full again, and the sliver never came back.

So when you look up tonight and the moon's a half over the car park, don't say it's just a bit of rock. Somebody had to push it.