Colour tattoo of a bee with translucent grey wings and a yellow and black striped abdomen on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bee tattoo on the forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A bee is shown head-on at a slight angle, with black antennae, black legs and dark-outlined eyes. Its wings are rendered in translucent grey with fine veining, and the thorax is shaded reddish brown. The abdomen carries bands of orange-yellow and black with soft shading, and the tattoo sits centrally on pale skin against a plain background.

Forearm Bee Insect Wing Stripe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been falling on the market at Thornbury Cross for three days, and Mabel Ferris sold honey from a trestle under a sheet of tarpaulin that sagged like a wet sail. Nobody bought honey in the rain. They bought bread and bleach and cheap socks, and walked past her jars with their collars up.

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On the fourth morning a bee came in under the tarpaulin. It was the size of a thumbnail and it was wet through, its grey wings pressed flat and useless against its back. It walked along the edge of the table as if it were reading the labels. Mabel did not shoo it. She had kept bees on the hill behind her mother's cottage for forty years, and she knew a beggar when one landed on her.

She lifted a drop of honey on the end of a knife and held it out. The bee climbed onto the knife, drank, and then, without any fuss, turned to face her with its black legs folded and its eyes like two small lamps. It seemed to be waiting for her to say something.

"Go on, then," Mabel said. "Tell the others where the good stall is."

The bee lifted off, and its wings opened the way a letter opens, and it went out into the rain. By noon a queue had formed at her trestle. By dusk she had sold every jar, and a boy from the bakery had bought the last of the comb for his mother's birthday, and the rain had stopped as if someone had turned a tap.