Colour tattoo of a honeybee with translucent wings and a shaded body, set in a ring of purple lavender and brown vine on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bee and lavender vine on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A honeybee sits at the centre with translucent grey-blue wings, a shaded black and amber body and a small teal wash behind it. Thin brown stems and purple lavender sprigs curl in a loose ring around the bee and cross at the bottom. Mixed colour ink with soft shading on the bee and clean outlines on the vine, photographed straight on against a dark tiled floor.

Botanical Realism Forearm Bee Lavender Vine Wing Sprig

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tomas had already hauled the second creel when the bee landed on the gunwale, drawn by the lavender his mother had tied to the wheelhouse rail for luck the morning the Mercy Rose sailed. The cliff gardens had been sending bees to those sprigs all week. He flicked at it with a wet glove. It walked along the wood, cleaned its face with both front legs, then lifted off towards open water as if it had business out there.

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Past the Hake Bank the swell lengthened and the boat rolled heavily. Old Pell, who had skippered out of Porthgwidden for forty years, said bees got blown out to sea all the time and most of them drowned, and a man should not waste hope on a thing with wings the size of fingernails. Tomas kept looking at the place where it had gone. Spray came over the bow in cold sheets. The nets came up heavy with mackerel, silver and flapping, and the work took his hands and his thoughts.

On the run home the wind dropped and the sea went flat and grey. Somewhere off the harbour mouth a smell came drifting over the water, green and sweet, lavender from the wall above the slip carried on the land breeze. Then the bee was back, tumbling down onto the coil of rope by his boots as though it had never left, dusted with salt and dragging its amber body.

Tomas cupped it in his palm and carried it up the slip to his mother, who was pegging out sheets against the wind. He set it on a purple spike. She laughed and said the sea had never wanted it after all. It stayed there while the gulls argued over the catch, its grey-blue wings catching the light like cellophane, until it was ready to go.