Small colour tattoo of a striped orange and black bee with pink wings and a curved trail of dots, in a fine line style on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bee with dotted trail on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A small bee with orange and black stripes, a dark head and antennae, and translucent pink wings is set against bare skin. A loose curve of tiny dots trails behind it, and the linework is fine with soft, lightly shaded colour. The tattoo sits near the centre of the frame with plenty of empty skin around it.

Fine line Dotwork Forearm Bee Dot Wing Stripe Insect

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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

It rained on the Saturday market the way it always did in February, sideways off the tin roofs, so the honey stalls kept their jars under plastic sheeting and their hands in their pockets. I was minding Nan's stall because her hip had finally said no. Nobody buys honey in the wet, she told me, but people will shelter under an awning and buy whatever's in front of them, and that's a different sale altogether.

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Around eleven a single bee came in under our awning, drunk on the cold, and sat on the lid of the blue jar I'd been polishing. I flicked at it with a tea towel. It didn't go. It walked along the rim as if reading the label, then lifted off and circled the stall in a loose ring, leaving behind it a trail of tiny dark specks that hung in the damp air and wouldn't fall. Mr Okonkwo from the florist's next door said it was the dampness getting into my eyes, and then he saw them too and went quiet.

Nan said it was a swarm marking its way, the old beekeepers' sign for a hive that had been lost. I said that was rubbish, and she said it was the only rubbish she still believed. So I followed the dots out past the fish van and the bric-a-brac man, rain tapping on my hood, and they led me round the back of the church hall to a gap under the eaves where a cracked window had never been mended. Inside was the hive Grandad had kept when Nan was a girl, sealed up for fifty years and still humming.

When I got back, Nan was already untying the apron. "Right," she said, looking at the wet box in my arms. "Sell it for the rain."