Traditional style colour tattoo of a straw beehive surrounded by red and orange flowers and green leaves on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Beehive and flowers on an upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A straw beehive, drawn as a skep with horizontal banding, sits at the centre of the design with a wreath of red and orange roses and green leaves around its lower edge. Bold black outlines define the shapes, with flat orange, yellow, red and green fills and simple shading on the hive. The tattoo fills most of the frame on an upper arm against dark clothing.

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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

The officer at the crossing wants to know what is humming in the box on your back seat, and you tell him it is only your grandmother's hive, which is almost true. The skep is coiled from wheat straw in bands of gold, the way she once coiled rope for the harbour boats, and it has sat in the same corner of her kitchen for longer than you have been alive. Inside, a few thousand bees are sleeping off a day of wind, and the paper round the base is still printed with the roses she painted there in red and orange.

Keep reading

He taps the lid with one knuckle and the hum rises, low and offended. Your papers are in order, or nearly so: a letter from a vet in Kent, a stamp, a signature in her looping hand that nobody on this side of the Channel has ever questioned. He reads it twice. He asks whether the bees have a name. You say that she called the queen Margery, after a neighbour who never once let anyone finish a sentence, and for a moment the sorting hall seems to lean in closer.

He lets you through with a sigh and a stamp that smells of ink and old coffee. You drive on in second gear, slower than you need to, because every bump in the lane wakes the colony a little more. Near the first hedgerow you pull over and lift the lid just enough to see the comb. A single bee climbs out, pauses on the rim as if checking the weather, and then lifts off over the wet fields towards a hedge already full of roses.

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