Small red and black ladybird tattoo on the top of a big toe, beside blue nail polish with a white flower.

Small ladybird tattoo on a big toe

Other · Colour · Photo

A small ladybird with a red body, black outline and blue-grey spots sits on the top of the big toe, with curled antennae reaching towards the toenail. The linework is bold and clean, with shading mainly in the spots and along the edges of the wings. The bare foot rests on a dark textured surface, and the blue nail polish with a white flower contrasts with the warm skin tone.

Other Ladybird Insect Nail polish Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You climb the broken stair of Harrowmere keep because the stone holds the afternoon warmth longer than anything else in the valley, and because the wind has not yet learned the gap in the north wall. Below, the moat is a green mirror with a heron standing in it like a dropped glove. Nobody has lived here since the roof came down, but the ivy has taken a lease on every window, and you have decided to be its lodger.

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You have four spots, not the seven the rhyme promises, and they are the grey-blue of wet slate, which is what happens when a ladybird is born in a quarry and then wanders off a cart. The stonemason's boy, Tobias Vane, finds you on his thumb while he mixes lime in a bucket. He holds his hand up so the whole yard can admire you. "Good omen," says the old mason, Abel, without looking up from the arch he is re-keying. "A beetle on the stone means the stone will stay."

Tobias doesn't believe in omens, but he does believe in wiping a pinch of lime off a mark, so he leaves you be and you climb. The arch has been waiting three hundred years for someone to notice it leans. By dusk you reach the top of the tallest stump, where a flagpole once stood, and the sky has gone the colour of a bruise on a plum.

Abel sets the last keystone with two soft knocks of his mallet. Down in the yard, Tobias calls you a daft little thing and blows you a kiss that smells of lime. You open your red wings, the only red left in Harrowmere, and let the cold air lift you over the wall.