Black and grey dotwork bee tattoo with flower and leaf sprigs spread across the centre of the chest.

Bee and flowers across the chest

Dotwork · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A large bee sits at the centre of the chest, with symmetrical sprigs of blossom, buds and leaves extending to either side. The bee's body and wings are built from stippled dots and fine outlines, with the body shaded in graded dotwork. The image is in black and grey and is framed from the lower chest to the waistband of a houndstooth skirt.

Dotwork Botanical Chest Bee Insect Flower Blossom Leaves Sprig Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit still, the lot of you, and mind the bean rows, because the bee is coming down the path and she does not like a fuss. Her name was Mabel Quennell, though the village called her Old Honey, and she kept the walled garden behind the rectory when the rector was too frightened of the wasps to go near it. Every spring she bargained with the blossom the way my mother bargained with the milkman. Give me a month of warm mornings, she'd say, and I'll see you have bees enough to carry your pollen to every corner of the parish.

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One April the orchard went quiet. The plum trees opened their white and nothing came to them. Mabel walked the rows in her boots and found the hives empty, every comb cold, and the little wind of wings gone out of the air. The rector said it was the weather. The schoolmaster said it was the Pearsons' new sprayer. Mabel said nothing. She only knelt by the wall and pressed her ear to the brick, the way you'd listen at a sleeping child's door.

Then, on the third morning, a single bee came over the wall, fat and dusty, and went straight to the bramble flowers that had been sulking under the hedge. Mabel followed it on her knees for an hour. It went where it liked and came back with its legs gold, and by evening she had worked out where the rest had gone. They had flown east to the fallow field past the mill, where someone had sown a patch of clover that nobody would ever cut.

Off you go now, and keep your boots off the bramble. That bee has a long way still to fly, and she'll want the sweetest flowers left standing when she gets there.