Two black linework insect wing tattoos with dotwork shading at the tips, one on each of two pale limbs against a light grey background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two insect wing tattoos on skin

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

Two matching insect wing designs sit side by side on pale skin, each drawn in black outline with a dense venation pattern and cell-like panels. The wings taper to a point, and the tips are shaded with stippled dots that fade toward the edges. The plain light grey backdrop keeps the focus on the ink and the simple, symmetrical composition.

Fine line Dotwork Other Wing Vein Pair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cicadas had been screaming in the fig trees since noon, so by the time the Pavilion doors opened Doreen had given up trying to hear the band over them. She ran the cloakroom from a wooden hatch at the foot of the stairs, hanging furs and church coats on brass hooks, and the sill outside her window was crusted with the empty cases the insects left behind, pale as sugar and split down the back.

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One evening, between a stiff gabardine and a pair of tan gloves, she found two wings lying side by side on the sill, drier and more delicate than the cases, their veins drawn in black as fine as a hair. Their tips had darkened as though dipped in ink. She laid them flat on a ticket card and weighed them down with a shilling. Teddy Vance, the clarinettist who had been loitering by the hatch all week, came up for his coat at half past eleven and found her staring at them.

'Somebody's going to tread on those,' he said. 'Give them here.' He pressed them between the pages of her ledger without asking why she kept them, and then asked her for the last waltz, which she refused twice and accepted on the third, under the chandelier, while the drummer packed his sticks away.

The band folded in September. Teddy sailed for Montreal on a cattle boat, and the fig trees went quiet. The following June the first cicada started up in the hedge by the car park, and Doreen opened the ledger to find the wings had kept their shape, two black-veined halves waiting for someone to lift them.