Traditional style tattoo of a teal and orange beetle with a central eye and green leaves, placed on the upper back near the neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional beetle with eye on upper back

Traditional · Back · Mixed · Photo

A beetle sits centrally with a single open eye on its head, long curled antennae and black outlines. Its wings are teal with white highlights and its body is patterned with orange, yellow and teal scales, with red accents throughout. Green and yellow leaves fan out beneath it against plain skin, filling the frame.

Traditional Back Beetle Eye Leaves Antennae Scale Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, and mind the guy ropes, because the thing in this tin has been trying to get out since Tuesday. Mrs Orla Penhale bought it from a tinker outside Wells for a shilling and a clean handkerchief, and she swore on her mother's grave it was a beetle the size of a fist, teal as a kingfisher's back, with one open eye set plumb in the middle of its head. She was right about the eye. You'll see it in a moment, when I lift the lid, and I'd thank you not to blink first.

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The fair was Pullen's Travelling Marvels then, a dozen caravans and a Wheel that squealed like a pig on every turn. Orla kept the beetle in the fortune tent under a square of green baize, feeding it crushed hawthorn leaves and the odd sugared almond. Each night it watched the punters through that single eye, counting their coins in its own slow way, and each night the scales along its back shone orange and gold like a fishmonger's tiles after rain.

The trouble came the night young Eli Marrow sat down for his palm reading. Eli had been lifting coppers from the Wheel's cash box all summer and believed, as boys do, that nobody had noticed. Orla read him the usual nonsense about a long journey and a dark-haired girl, then tipped the tin toward him. The beetle raised its wings, the teal flashing white at the edges, and turned its eye on his coat pocket. Eli went the colour of putty. He emptied it onto the baize, every stolen penny, and begged the beetle to look somewhere else.

Orla never did sell it, and Eli never came back to the Wheel. Lift the lid now, carefully. There. See how it's walking back to the leaves? It only ever wanted a garden to keep, and it isn't shy about watching whoever comes to visit.