Two mirrored traditional-style tattoos on the knees, each showing a yellow and black bee, small blue and orange flowers and a red bow.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bees and red bow on matching knees

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

Two mirrored tattoos sit side by side on the knees, each showing a large striped bee with smaller bees, dotted flight paths, small blue and orange flowers and a red bow below. The bold black outlines and flat, solid fills are typical of traditional tattooing, with some soft shading on the bee bodies and wings. The palette is mainly yellow, black, red and blue against the skin, and the two halves are arranged symmetrically.

Traditional Other Bee Flower Bow Ribbon Symmetry

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nan,

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We moored at Braunston on Tuesday beside a row of white hives behind the towpath, the ones with green felt roofs. The lock-keeper's wife keeps them. Ned paid her two shillings for a jar of honey and I told him that was robbery, but he said the jar was pretty and I could keep it on the cabin shelf. It sits by the porthole now, and in the mornings the light comes through it and the whole cabin goes the colour of old brass.

She told me the bees fly out in a straight line until they find a good field, then dance on the comb to tell the others where the clover is. I asked how she knew what they were saying. She laughed and said she didn't, she only watched them come home heavy and that was enough. Ned says it is the most sensible thing anyone has said to him all year, and he has been talking to the dockers in Brentford.

On Saturday we tied up under the bridge and I sat on the roof with the red ribbon from your sewing box. I knotted it round the mast stay so it would flutter over the water. Two of the boatmen's children came along the bank to count the bees they could see, which was four, then six, then they lost count and started chasing a wasp off the bread.

Ned came up at dusk and untied the ribbon, then tied it again on the far side of the stay so the two ends matched. He said the lock-keeper's wife would want a pair. I didn't argue. Tell Mum the honey's gone, and I've saved her the jar.