Black and grey tattoo of a stylised face with dark curled hair and a stag beetle on its crown, with insect legs running down the sides, on a forearm.

Stag beetle over a stylised face on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A stylised face with large, staring eyes and dark curled hair sits at the centre of the design, with a stag beetle perched on top of the head. Long, thin insect legs or antennae curve down and around the face and the beetle. The work is done in clean black outlines with solid black fills for the hair and beetle, and the skin of the face is left open. The design is framed by the pale skin of the forearm on a dark, out-of-focus background.

Forearm Face Beetle Hair Portrait Antennae

Find an artist for this

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

The beetle came up out of the compost heap the week Mrs Pardoe stopped speaking to her husband, and it sat on the potting shelf with its great jaws open like a pair of tongs, watching the girl who had been sent for the twine. Her name was Ada Lusk. She was nine, and she had been given the garden work because nobody else in the cottage wanted to be out of doors with the wind.

Keep reading

Her grandmother said the beetle was the garden's own face, come to look at who was tending it. "Don't stare back," she said. "Look at the leaves instead."

Ada did not look at the leaves. She looked at the beetle, and the beetle looked at her, and after a while she saw that the hairs on its back were curled like the ringlets of a woman who had lived under the hedge a very long time. Its legs came out from under the shell, thin as bean-stalks, and reached for the trellis, the rose, the bench and the wall where the peas climbed.

On the Sunday, when the rain stopped, the garden wall had a new face in the moss. It had two wide eyes and a mouth shut like a purse, and it was smiling, though nobody had taught it how. Ada cut the blown bloom from the rose with her grandmother's knife, set it on the wall the way you would set out a saucer of milk for a cat, and went indoors without a word. The next morning the beetle had gone, and the peas had been picked clean by someone with very long fingers.