Small bee tattoo with black outline and yellow stripes on the top of a foot, with a matching stencil on the table beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bee tattoo on the top of a foot

Fine line · Other · Mixed · Photo

A small bee is tattooed on the upper side of a foot, drawn with a thin dark outline and filled with yellow and black stripes on the body. Wings are outlined in grey-black with little open detail, and a short curved antenna extends forward. A matching paper stencil sits on the green table at top left, and a gloved hand holds a paper towel at the left edge.

Fine line Other Bee Insect Wing Stencil

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Mr Abbott, you asked me to put down what happened on the Tuesday the bee got on at Hatherleigh, so here it is as plainly as I can manage. I was wheeling the parcel barrow along the up platform when the 7.42 pulled in with its doors wide, and a smell of cut clover rolled out of the third carriage. Trains on this line do not usually smell of clover, so I knew something had come aboard before I saw it. The bee sat on the brass rail of the guard's van for two stations, bold as a ticket inspector, and not one passenger thought to swat it.

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When the train stopped, it dropped onto the ticket hatch where Mrs Penrose was counting out change. She didn't flap. She held her palm flat under the window and the bee walked onto her knuckle as if it had been waiting years for an introduction. Then she carried it out past the old enamel sign and set it on the gatepost in the sun. Before it left, she drew round it with a carpenter's pencil on the back of a timetable: fat body, a curl of feeler, wings like two squashed teardrops. Under the drawing she wrote, for the man who keeps leaving sugar lumps in his coat.

That man was you, and I will admit I was cross about it at first, because you never once told me you were feeding bees on my platform. But she pinned the timetable above the lost property shelf, and it is still there, curling at the corners. The bee had gone over the water tower by the time the 8.10 pulled out. Come and collect the drawing before the Friday train, or I shall start charging it rent. Yours sincerely, Arthur Hale, porter.