Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a honeybee with stippled wings and shaded striped abdomen, on a person's limb.

Bee tattoo in dotwork

Dotwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed honeybee is tattooed in the centre of the frame, shown from above with its wings spread and legs extended. The wings use fine outlines with stippled dots and the body is built from dense dot shading and horizontal bands. The design is in black and grey ink against pale, freckled skin, with a plain dark background.

Dotwork Other Bee Insect Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hall still smells of floor polish and the same orange squash from the Year Eleven leavers' do, and Gareth Pryce is telling the bee story wrong again. You let him. You have been holding a warm glass of white wine for ten minutes, and the stem has gone slippery in your fingers.

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It was Mrs Adeyemi's biology lesson, the spring everyone had to draw one insect from life. The others took ladybirds off the windowsill. You went out behind the science block with a jam jar and came back with a honeybee that had crawled into a crisp packet and given up. You drew it dot by dot, because pencil lines made it look like a diagram and you wanted it to look like something that had once been busy. You spent three lunchtimes on the wings alone. Mrs Adeyemi held the page up to the window and said nobody had ever been so patient with a dead thing.

Gareth says you buried it under the netball posts. You didn't. You kept the drawing folded inside your planner, and later the real bee went into an envelope and then a shoebox, and the shoebox is in your mum's loft in Swindon beneath the school reports. Tonight someone wants you to draw it again on a beer mat, and your hand, which has done a lot of careful work since, hesitates over the first dot.

Then the old teacher comes across the room on her grandson's arm, eighty years old and sharper than either of you. She doesn't mention the bee. She just taps the beer mat, now covered in your uneven dots, and says the wings are too even, the way they always were, and that you should have trusted the gaps.