Black and grey bee tattoo with a crown above it on a forearm, drawn in fine line with dotwork shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bee and crown on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large bee sits centrally with its wings spread, with a small crown above its head. The outlines are fine and dark, while the thorax and abdomen are filled with stippled dotwork and light banding. The image is in black and grey on pale skin, with the design centred and a purple cord bracelet visible at the bottom of the frame.

Fine line Dotwork Forearm Bee Crown Wing Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the last week of August the windfalls under the Bramley trees had gone soft and sweet, and Mabel Pryce spent her evenings gathering them into the wheelbarrow while the wasps argued over the bruised ones. Her grandfather had kept bees in the old wall hive by the cider barn for fifty years, and he used to say the colony would only stay where its queen was content. Since his funeral the hive had hummed less, and Owen had started talking about a man from Ledbury who would pay good money for the lot, glass boxes and all.

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The crown was Grandad's joke. Years back he had glued a brass coronation crown, the sort off a tin mug, to the lid of the queen's box so the grandchildren would know which bee to watch. Nobody had touched it since. On the Sunday before the sale, Mabel lifted the lid with a smoker that wouldn't stay lit and found the queen walking the comb in the gold light, wings folded, as calm as a magistrate. Owen swore and stepped back. Mabel did not.

They moved the frames at dusk, when the foragers were home. Mabel carried the queen's box across the yard with the crown tilting on its lid, and when she tipped it into the new skep under the cider barn, the queen lifted, circled twice, and drifted over the wall towards the old hive, then turned and came back, as if she had counted them and found one missing. The workers followed her in a dark slow column, and by the time the swifts had gone, the whole colony had settled in the new home.

Mabel stayed until the lane was blue. She set the brass crown back on top of the skep, where it caught the last of the light, and watched the stragglers stumble in with their pollen legs heavy. Owen could ring the man from Ledbury in the morning. The bees had already decided where they lived.