Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a dark blue scarab beetle with orange wings and a red gem on the chest, framed by teal foliage and dotted chains.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Scarab beetle with orange wings on the chest

Neo-trad · Chest · Colour · Photo

A large scarab beetle with dark blue-green shell, orange wings and a red oval gem on its body is centred on the chest, with long antennae and legs. Teal leaf-like scrollwork and dotted chain lines sit beneath and around it, with a small pendant shape at the base. The shading is smooth and saturated, and the design is symmetrical and fills the frame.

Neo-trad Chest Beetle Wing Gem Foliage Scrollwork Dotted chain Pendant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Margaret Coyle came back to the reunion with the stone still in her pocket, because nobody had ever asked her to give it up. The hall smelled of floor polish and the urn Mrs Abbott had boiled for the tea. Forty-one years since the Sixth Form, and the same faces had gone soft at the edges, like bread left out.

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The beetle had come to the school in 1979, pinned under the glass of the biology cupboard, a scarab from Egypt that the headmaster swore was real and Gerald Pike swore was a fake. Its shell was the blue-green of a kingfisher's back when the light caught it. Set into its belly was a red stone the size of a robin's egg, and on the last day of term Margaret lifted the case and took it. Nobody noticed, because nobody ever noticed Margaret.

Gerald came over now with his paper cup and his bad knee and asked whether she still had it. She said she did. He said his mother had always told him that a thing taken from a schoolroom would bring the schoolroom back to you, and Margaret laughed, and then she didn't. Outside, the car park lamps came on one by one, each a small gold coin on the wet tarmac.

She unwrapped the handkerchief in her lap and set the stone on the trestle table between the sandwiches. Gerald looked at it for a long time. Then he took a sausage roll, bit it, and said, "It was always the beetle that wanted to go home." She understood that she had been forgiven for something neither of them had said aloud.