Traditional style colour tattoo of an orange and teal bee over a honeycomb, framed by a wreath of red and blue flowers and green leaves, on a limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bee over honeycomb with flower wreath

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A bee with outstretched teal and orange wings is centred over a pale orange honeycomb outline, with a dotted arc above it. A wreath of red and blue flowers and green leaves curves along the lower edge of the design. The bold black outlines and flat, solid fills in orange, teal, red and green are typical of traditional tattooing, and the composition is centred on the bee with the wreath framing it.

Traditional Botanical Other Bee Honeycomb Flower Leaves Wreath Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third week of October the big top had been sold for scrap in Boston, and what remained of Fenwick's Travelling Marvels fitted into two wagons and a caravan with a cracked window. Ada counted the hives twice before the lorry left, the way her father had taught her to count the ponies. Seven wooden hives, strapped to the flatbed under a tarpaulin that snapped in the wind off the Wash.

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The honey was the only act that still paid. She had hand-lettered the jars at the kitchen table in the caravan, each label curling at one corner where the glue had dried wrong, and she sold them at the gate of every village hall between Spalding and Wisbech. Mr Lowry still wore the red ringmaster's coat, though the braid had gone green at the seams, and he still announced the bees as if they were tigers. Eleven people came to the hall in Holbeach. A boy in a school jumper counted them out loud.

Halfway through the demonstration a bee walked up the cuff of Lowry's sleeve and stopped at his wrist. He did not flinch. He held his arm out over the front row, very still, and the boy stopped counting. Ada watched the bee lift, circle once above the trestle table, and then trace a loose ring over the heads of the audience, as if following a path that only it could see, before it dropped back into the nearest hive.

Afterwards she painted the last of the paint onto the side of the wagon, a wreath of red roses and blue cornflowers, the leaves dark and sure. It was not much of a parade. But the bees had always known the way home.