Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bee tattoo on the inner wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed black bee sits on the inner wrist, shown with outstretched wings, a striped abdomen and a small highlighted area on the thorax. The bee is rendered in black ink with fine linework and solid fills, with no colour. Two hands are held together in the frame, with a silver chain bracelet on one wrist, and the background is a dark tiled floor.

Forearm Bee Insect Wing

Find an artist for this

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

You were told the hive would hold until the first frost, and so you kept the honey-house door shut against the wasps and counted the combs twice each morning. The valley of Ammerhollow had never needed a queen to be seen, only a keeper who could hear the swarm changing its mind. Your grandmother used to hum to the hives in a low, flat tune, and the bees would lift their heads like dogs at a whistle. You never learned the tune. You learned instead to tap the wooden walls with a knuckle and listen for the answer.

Keep reading

On the ninth night the hum went wrong. It rose in pitch and split, half of it drifting toward the river road where the lamplighters' carts came through. You went out barefoot with a smoking pipe of dried lavender and a tin cup of sugar water, and you walked the long rows until the sound pooled around your wrist like warm water. A single bee settled there, slow and heavy, its wings laid flat as if it had been stitched on. It did not sting. It turned once, showing the pale patch on its chest, and then it lifted and led you down the river path toward the carts.

The lamplighters had stopped to rest their horses beneath the willows. You set the cup on the bank and let the swarm find it, and by dawn the whole cloud had gone back into the boxes without a single sting or a word from anyone. Your grandmother's tune came back to you while you swept the honey-house floor, and you hummed it under your breath, badly, and the hives did not mind at all.