Black and grey realistic bee tattoo with shaded wings and the words 'You're the bee's knees but so am I' above and below it, on a calf.

Bee with pun lettering on a calf

Lettering · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded black and grey bee sits centrally on the calf, with its wings and striped abdomen rendered in soft grey gradients. The wording 'You're the bee's knees' is set above the insect and 'But so am I' below it, both in a bold, plain sans-serif capital font. The skin is lit evenly against a pale background, with another dark tattoo partly visible at the top right edge.

Lettering Traditional Calf Bee Insect Lettering Wing Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hush now, and pass the cake along, for this is the tale of Tom Fennick and the hive behind the vicarage, and it gets told at every wedding in Hollin Cross whether the couple likes it or not. Tom was a lad who could not string three words together without a joke tucked in the middle, and the summer he was nineteen he went courting Agnes Burrow with a jar of clover honey and a verse he had made up on the walk over.

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He stood at her gate, cap in hand, and said, 'Agnes, you're the bee's knees.' She looked at him over the washing line, pegged a stocking, and said, 'Aye, and so am I, Tom Fennick, so you'll have to do better than that.' The whole lane heard it. Old Mrs Pryor dropped her basket of eggs right there on the cobbles, and the eggs went everywhere, and nobody has let Tom forget it since.

He went home red to the ears and sat up all night in the orchard with his notebook. Come morning he had seven more verses, every one about bees, and not one of them rhymed. Agnes read the lot on the bench by the church wall and laughed until she had to sit down on the grass. That, my dears, is how a man learns that a clever girl will always have the last word, and that the last word is the sweetest thing going.

So raise your glasses to the bride and groom, who are the bee's knees, and to each other, who are the bee's knees too, and let nobody here say the old buzzer hasn't taught us anything.