Colour tattoo of three red ladybirds with black spots and outlines, linked by a dashed line with loops, on pale skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three ladybirds on a dashed trail

Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows three ladybirds with red wings, black outlines and black spots, arranged in a diagonal row. A dashed line with small looping curves connects them, as if tracing a path. The bold red fill and clean black linework stand out against the pale, smooth skin, with a plain background.

Ladybird Dashed line Trail Loop Spots

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

Agnes found the three ladybirds on the kitchen windowsill the morning after the first hard frost, stiff as buttons and the red of a split cherry. Her father said they had gone looking for a place to sleep through the cold, the way the old people did, and that they would be dead by Candlemas if nobody showed them the way. So she took a length of black wool from the mending basket and laid it across the flagstones, from the sill to the cold hearth to the back door, looping it round the legs of the table so they would not lose the line.

Keep reading

Days passed. Snow came down over the top field and buried the water trough. Each morning Agnes checked the wool, and each morning the ladybirds had moved a little, one further along, one doubling back as if to look again. The middle one kept stopping at the bread crock, turning on its back, and Agnes would lift it on a crumb of cheese and set it right.

On the twelfth morning the wool had been pulled clean through, and the three ladybirds were gone from the sill. Behind the woodpile, under a sack in the byre, she found them huddled in a crack of the stone wall where the warmth of the cows came up through the floor. Her father stood in the doorway with his breath smoking and said nothing for a long while.

"They knew the road," he said at last. "You only had to lay it out." Agnes wound the wool back onto its spool one loop at a time, and left the byre door open a crack so the thin light could find them.