Two black and grey forearm tattoos in a stippled style: a songbird on a branch with stars and a rose on the right arm, and a honeycomb-filled vessel with leaves on the left arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bird and honeycomb forearm tattoos

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows two forearms covered in black and grey tattoos, one with a honeycomb-filled vessel, leaves and a small winged insect, and the other with a songbird perched on a branch beside stars, a small crown-like motif, a rosette and a rose at the wrist. The linework is fine and the shading is built up with stippled dots, especially on the bird's plumage. The arms are shown close up against a grey knit sleeve, with the tattoos filling most of the frame.

Dotwork Botanical Forearm Bird Songbird Honeycomb Leaves Star Rose Flower Crown Vessel Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swarm left the abbey orchard at noon, which no swarm of Saint Aldric's bees had ever done, and Brother Tobias ran after it with a linen sheet over one arm and a smoking pot in the other. He lost the cloud above the mill, found it again over the ford, and at last saw it settle on a hawthorn where a songbird sat on the highest twig, its feathers dark as wet slate.

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The bird did not stir when he came close. It opened its beak and sang one plain note, then another, and the bees poured down the trunk as if on a rope, into a clay jar hanging from a nail that Tobias had not noticed until then. "They will live in your house," the bird said, in the voice of his mother, who had been dead nine years, "and you will give me the first comb every autumn, and you will cut me a crown that does not tarnish."

He agreed, because a monk who lets a swarm go is a poor monk. Each autumn he set the first golden comb on the chapel step, and each autumn the bird came down for it. The novices thought him mad to be feeding a thrush, but the crown he cut was from walnut and the bird was content with it, so long as he sang the stars on the chapel wall beside it each spring.

When Tobias grew old and could no longer climb the orchard ladder, the bees still hummed in the jar and the bird still came for its share. The brothers say that on the morning they buried him, the songbird sat on the chapel wall above the grave and sang until the honey on the step had gone to wax.