Black and grey bee tattoo with flowers and leafy sprigs across the chest, with dotwork shading on the bee's body.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bee and flowers across the chest

Botanical · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A large bee sits at the centre of a symmetrical arrangement of small flowers, buds and leafy sprigs, with the wings and body outlined in fine black linework. The bee's abdomen and thorax are shaded with stippled dots, while the petals and leaves use lighter line and simple shading. The image is in black and grey and is framed closely on the chest, with a checked skirt at the bottom edge.

Botanical Dotwork Chest Bee Insect Flower Leaves Sprig Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hum reached the village hall before anyone else did, rolling in through the open sash windows on the afternoon the old Year Sevens were due back. Nan Hollis said it came from the hives behind the chapel, that bees always know when someone has come home, and nobody argued with Nan Hollis about bees.

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Ruth Amery came late, in a grey coat, and stood at the trestle table holding a paper cup of squash she did not drink. She had not spoken to Daniel Sowerby since the summer they were fourteen, when he told the whole class she kept a jar of pressed clover in her desk and cried over it. A bee came in off the sill and walked the length of the table between the sandwiches, slow as a clerk, and stopped beside her hand. Its back was striped like a pocket watch and its wings were fine as the veins in a leaf.

Daniel saw it too. He crossed the room with his hands in his pockets, and the bee lifted and circled them both twice before settling on the faded cloth, on the printed clusters of cranesbill and wild rose that used to grow along the school wall. 'You still have the clover?' he asked. She said it had dried to dust years ago. 'Then we both owe the bee a jar,' he said, and the hum in the hall went quiet enough to hear the urn tick.

Nan Hollis, watching from the doorway, said nothing. When the bee left through the window it carried a single sugar crumb from the tea table, and by the time the urn was empty Ruth had written her address on the back of a raffle ticket and pushed it across the cloth, where the flowers were still waiting for someone to pick them.