Black and grey dotwork drawing of a stag beetle with a skull and two faces overlaid on its body, set within a circle and dashed triangles.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stag beetle with skull and faces design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A stag beetle is drawn in black ink with wings spread, and a human skull and two female faces are layered over its abdomen and wings. The shading is built from fine stippled dots, with clean linework for the antlers, legs and circle. The composition is centred on white paper, with a thin circle and dashed triangles framing the insect.

Dotwork Geometric Beetle Skull Face Woman Wing Insect Circle Triangle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The beetle is in your palm before you have decided to pick it up, its jaws opening and closing like a pair of tiny rusted shears, while behind you the last lamp goes out along Hollin Lane. Your brother is waiting at the gate with his arms folded, because he dared you, and because you have never once in your life refused a dare from him.

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Nobody in Ashwell takes a stag beetle from the old oak at the wood's edge. Your grandmother said so every autumn, pressing a thumb to your forehead as if the rule might sink in. They carry the faces of the ones who went past the stile and did not come back, she said, and they will show you the way they went. You drop the beetle into a biscuit tin anyway, punch air holes with a nail, and walk out under the hawthorns with the moon hanging low over the stones.

At the stile the tin lid lifts by itself. The beetle climbs out, unfolds its wings with a sound like a page turning, and rises into the moonlight. On its back the two women's faces turn towards you, one with her hair combed out over a skull's brow, the other with her eyes rolled up to the sky. The skull beneath them is grinning. The beetle circles you three times, tracing a ring of silver on the dark, and then it is gone over the trees.

You walk home with the empty tin under your arm. At the gate your brother is asleep in the grass, and when you bend to shake him you see the bottom of the tin is pressed with a faint, perfect dot pattern, the kind a careful hand leaves when it has taken its time. Your grandmother's light is on in the kitchen, though it is long past midnight, and she is waiting with the kettle on and her thumb already raised.