Solid black blackwork design of a symmetrical insect-like motif built from hexagons and curling arms, shown as a drawing with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Symmetrical hexagon and curl design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A bold, symmetrical black motif shows a central column of three hexagonal shapes with inner curves, flanked by looping arms and curled terminals at the top and bottom. The linework is thick and solid, with white inner outlines separating the black forms. The design is shown in black on a white background with no shading or colour.

Blackwork Geometric Hexagon Curl Spiral Insect Abstract

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are sent past the last fence at Hollin Dyke with a lantern and a tin of lamp oil, because the beech wood has started humming at dusk. Mrs Peverell swears it is the hive-beetles coming up from the roots. Her son went in last March and came back counting the edges of things, and he has not stopped since.

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The clearing is ringed with trunks that have six flat sides, as if something patient has been shaping them for centuries. In the middle stands a grey stone with three honeycomb cells pressed into it, and in each cell a curl has been carved like a seed. Beetles the colour of wet ink walk in a line across the moss, their legs looping and unlooping. You kneel and start to count, because counting is what the forest wants, but the number keeps changing under your thumb.

The largest beetle lifts its head, and two horns unfurl from it like young bracken. It does not come at you. It waits, and you understand the hum is a tally: a plank of sawn wood for every hexagon the village has taken, a name for every curl. You think of the Peverell boy and the gate he taps in threes. Slowly you set the lantern down in the middle cell, and the humming stops as if someone has closed a door.

Walking home at dawn you find him leaning on the gate, whole and quiet, with dew on his boots. He asks whether you counted. You say six, and he nods with relief, because six is the sum the wood agreed to keep. Behind you the beeches begin again, very softly, adding up what is still owed.