Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a bee and a red honeycomb heart with honeysuckle and leaves on the side of a neck.

Bee and honeycomb heart on the side of the neck

Neo-trad · Neck · Colour · Photo

A bumblebee with translucent wings sits in front of a heart-shaped golden frame filled with a red honeycomb pattern. Trailing honeysuckle flowers and green leaves wrap around the top and right of the design. Bold black outlines, saturated red, orange, green and teal fills, and small highlight dots give the piece a bright, flat, traditional look.

Neo-trad Botanical Neck Bee Honeycomb Heart Flower Leaves Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mother never let a bee into the dining room, so when the bumblebee came bumbling through the open sash at breakfast, forks stopped mid-air and Mr Pellow went quite still behind the Gazette. It thudded against the window glass again and again, a fat striped thing with wings like pressed tissue, while the sea wind lifted the net curtains and the honeysuckle on the porch knocked its pale bells against the wall.

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I was twelve that summer and the only one not afraid of it. I cupped my hands around the bee the way Dad had shown me before he went to Dunkirk and never came home to show anyone else, and carried it out past the gatepost to the honeysuckle that grew wild over the wall. It settled on a trumpet of flower for a long moment, then crawled inside, its whole body humming the petals open.

Mr Pellow was waiting by the gate when I came back, his hat in his hand. He was a lodger from Leeds who had come every August for six years and never once spoke to anyone but the milkman. He held out a small heart-shaped tin, its gold paint worn to brass at the edges. Inside, a sliver of honeycomb glowed like stained glass where the sun caught it.

"For the girl who isn't frightened of bees," he said. "Your father would have said the same. He wrote to me from France, you know. Said the bees on the cliffs above the beach were the only things out there that made sense."

I did not know that. I put the tin in my pocket and felt its warmth through the cotton all the way up the steps, and I did not tell Mother, and I have never told anyone until now.