Black line drawing of a spider web with curled swirls through its strands and a small spider in the lower right corner, shown as a tattoo design sketch.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Spider web with swirls and a small spider

Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of a circular spider web with radiating straight strands and a spiral pattern of curled swirls across the inner rings. A small spider sits near the lower right edge of the web. The linework is uniform and clean on a white background, with no shading or colour.

Spider web Spider Swirl Spiral Web

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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 closer, you lot, the rain's only in the gutters and the gutters don't tell stories. Now. Every Thursday the awnings at Wexcombe market sagged under the weather, and every Thursday old Mrs Pellow's spider came down from the iron gate and mended them. Not with thread from a shop. She spun from the gate to the fishmonger's pole, from the pole to the cheese man's hook, and where the wind bit a strand through she laid a little curl of silk, one turn, then another, so the wind would have to think twice before it tried again.

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The stallholders paid her in crumbs and the odd button. Nobody asked why a spider would bother with a market, and the spider never said. But a web built for rain holds the rain. By the second week of March the whole square was strung with drops like beads on a rosary, and the rent man, who had never once been out in weather, came down the lane with his umbrella and stopped dead beneath it, staring up.

He tried to sketch the web for the council. The drops shook loose and ran off his collar and into his ledger. Well, that's the spider's price, said the cheese man, and they shared out the coins that had caught in the silk that morning. The spider took her share at the very edge, down by the drain, where the view was best.

So when it rains on Wexcombe, look up. If you see a curl of silk tucked in twice, somebody's been mending.