Black and grey realistic bee tattoo with poppies and wildflowers on an upper arm.

Bee and poppies on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large, shaded bee sits at the centre of the design, with wings drawn in fine outline and a soft, rounded body banded with stripes. Poppy blooms, delicate umbel-type wildflowers and leafy sprigs wrap around the upper arm, with some linework and some soft grey shading. The image is composed as a close view of the arm against a dark top, and the tattoo is rendered entirely in black and grey ink.

Botanical Realism Upper arm Bee Poppy Wildflower Flower Leaves Sprig Insect

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down closer, the fire's too far for old bones and too near for young ones. No, don't fidget, you'll hear it better that way. Edith Hollin kept bees at the top of Moss Lane, where the wood gives out into the hayfields, and she had one hive that would never be moved. The bees in it were cross and fat and always the last out in the morning.

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Every June the poppies came up through the wheat along the wall, red as a struck match, and every June the oldest bee in that hive went out before dawn, straight over the lane and into the cow parsley at the forest edge. Nobody could say why. Her brother said she was courting. Her mother said she was simple. Edith only ever said, let her go, she knows the way.

One summer the rain did not stop for nine days. The brook came over the lane, the hayfields went black, and on the tenth morning the old bee did not come back. Edith went out with a lantern and a heel of bread, calling the way you call a dog, and found her at last under a poppy at the wood's edge, wings folded, pollen on her legs like a thread of gold.

Edith sat in the wet grass until the sun came up. Then she carried the poppy home in a jar, bee and all, and set them on the kitchen sill where the light could reach. Whatever that old bee had been carrying out to the forest all those summers, somebody had to carry it back.