Black and grey dotwork and traditional tattoos on a forearm and hand, including a large bee, planets, a dotted constellation and crystals.

Bee, planets and crystals on forearm and hand

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two arms rest on a dark bedspread, showing a dense collection of black tattoos. The largest is a bee on the forearm, shaded with solid black fill and fine outline, set within a dotted circle and a dotted line of planets. The hand and wrist carry a mandala, crystal clusters, a small bee, mushrooms on the fingers and a bottle with a skull label, all in simple outlines and fills.

Dotwork Traditional Forearm Hand Bee Planet Crystal Mandala Constellation Star Mushroom Bottle Skull Bone Moon Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bees went aboard at Lisbon in a crate lashed to the mainmast, forty-one hundredweight of wax and bristling worker, and by the third week out they had decided the ship was a hive with a leaking roof. I kept the galley and the medicine chest, which on a barque of that size meant I kept the honey too. Every night I measured out a spoon of it into the sea-sick draught, a brown tincture of poppy and comb that I stored in a squat green bottle with a skull chalked on its label, so the men would not mistake it for gin.

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The navigator, Ines Pardal, counted stars from the foredeck with a slate and a stub of chalk. She drew the dotted line of the belt of Orion, then the dots of Saturn's rings, and told me that a bee, once it has learned a sky, never forgets the pattern of it. I thought she was being poetic until the squall came down off the Berlengas, took the topsail clean away, and the queen swarmed from her box. She hung from the upper yard like a bunch of black grapes, and the whole colony clung to her in a single shuddering knot.

The captain wanted to cut the rigging and let them drown. Ines stopped him. She watched where the swarm leaned as the wind shifted, and she set our course by it, one hand on the wheel and the other on her slate, dotting a path across the chart. Three days later we raised the Azores with the swarm still clinging to the yard, quiet as a hymn.

I put a single cell of comb on the chart that night, pressed into the blue where Ines had marked the stars. It held the light the way the planets did, and the skull on my bottle caught the lamp, and for once none of us minded the drifting smell of honey and salt.