Black and grey dotwork drawing of a stag beetle with a skull and two female faces at its centre, set within a circle and triangles.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stag beetle with skull and faces

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A stag beetle is drawn from above with outspread wings, its body and head built from fine dots and stipple shading. At the centre, a human skull sits over the beetle's abdomen, with two female faces with closed eyes overlapping either side of it, and the faces are split into angled panels. A thin circle and dashed triangles frame the composition on a plain off-white background.

Dotwork Geometric Beetle Skull Woman Face Wing Circle Triangle

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

Dear Tom,

Keep reading

The stag beetles came up the lane again last night, all at once, the way they do when the air goes thick and warm after dark. I stood under the lamp at the gate with a torch in one hand and your old tin of pins in the other, and watched them bumble into the light like drunk little bulls. Mrs Okafor from the cottage asked whether they were dangerous. I said only to each other.

The oak stump in the top field is still giving them somewhere to live, though Dad would have had the whole thing out by now. When I dug at its base on Sunday I found a skull the size of a walnut, pale as a shell, wedged in the roots where the wood had gone soft and sweet. Probably a field mouse. I put it in the cigar box with the wing cases you sent me from Lewes, and the lid still won't shut properly.

Here is the thing I keep coming back to. The biggest male, the one with jaws like a pair of antlers, was fighting a smaller one on the gatepost. They locked horns for nearly a minute, and then the small one simply let go and walked off into the grass. Nobody won. Nobody needed to. I thought of Father sitting at the table with the paper folded over, deciding whether to speak.

Come down at the weekend if you can. Bring the good torch. We'll go and look at the stump together, I'll show you the skull, and you can tell me whether I should keep it or give it back to the earth.

Love, Ruth