Traditional style black and grey insect tattoos stacked down both calves, with beetles, a bee and a wasp, and touches of ochre and yellow ink.

Six insects stacked down two calves

Traditional · Calf · Mixed · Photo

Two lower legs are shown from the front, each carrying a column of three insect tattoos, including beetles, a bee and a wasp-like insect. The linework is bold and black, with solid black areas and grey shading giving the bodies and wings their form. Muted ochre and yellow accents appear on the spotted wing cases and striped abdomens, and the arrangement is symmetrical and tidy.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cabinet of curiosities had been Mrs Orla Penhallow's pride for thirty years, a long pine case with brass hinges that travelled the fairgrounds from Scarborough to Skegness in the back of a painted lorry. Tonight Tobias was counting the drawers for the third time, his lamp guttering on the oilcloth. Six pinned specimens were missing from the second row, and in their place lay six small wet footprints, none of them his.

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He found the first beetle on the Wheel of Fortune, clinging to the spokes above the bulbs, its spotted wing cases glinting ochre in the light. The wasp was in the Dodgem pen, its long antennae combing the rubber bumpers. A bee drifted over the candyfloss stall, humming the old tune the calliope used to play before the engine seized. Tobias followed them the way Orla had taught him to follow a customer's eye, slow and sidelong, never directly.

By dawn he had collected all six and laid them in a row on the cabinet's glass lid, each one lined up under the next, as tidy as the day they were pinned. Then the fly landed on his own sleeve, very gently, and he understood that the cabinet had never been the thing on display. He pinned it there, out of respect, and went to wake Orla with the news that the fair had a new attraction.

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