Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a stag beetle with spread wings on a forearm.

Stag beetle tattoo on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large stag beetle is shown from above, with its antlered jaws at the top, folded wing cases in the centre and translucent wings extending to either side. The insect is built from fine outlines, with stippled dotwork shading creating texture on the wing cases, abdomen and legs. The tattoo is rendered entirely in black and grey ink and fills most of the frame against a plain background.

Dotwork Forearm Beetle Insect Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tobias,

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The stag beetle you sent me for the Michaelmas plate has died on the scriptorium windowsill, and I have not had the heart to pin it yet. Brother Cuthbert says a beetle that dies in the light should be left for the ants, but I cannot bring myself to surrender those jaws. They curve up like antlers a stag would be ashamed to lose, and every tine is ringed with tiny points I have stippled one dot at a time, as you taught me, until my wrist ached through Compline.

Abbot Osric came by this morning and asked why I was wasting good nib on an insect when the lower garden had flooded and the bees were drowning in the rain barrels. I showed him the drawing. He held it to the window for a long while and said the wing cases looked like mail worn by a knight who had fallen into the fen. I did not tell him the wings were the hardest part, that thin veined membrane which lets the light through, so that one careful line makes the paper seem to breathe.

I have decided to send you the plate after all, with the beetle wrapped in linen beneath it, so you can judge whether I got the legs right. Two of them bend the wrong way, I fear. Cuthbert insists that is simply how they walk in the dark, and I am too tired to argue with him.

When the frost comes I will pin the beetle with its jaws raised toward the window, so that whoever opens the herbarium next winter will think it still has somewhere to go.

Your brother in ink, Anselm