Black blackwork tattoo on a leg, with a honeycomb of hexagons on the calf, parallel lines running down the shin and curved bands across the thigh.

Blackwork honeycomb and lines on a leg

Blackwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A person sits on the edge of a light surface with one leg extended, showing a black tattoo from the thigh to the ankle. A dense field of hexagons, like a honeycomb, covers the calf, with parallel lines running down the shin and curved solid bands wrapping the thigh. The ink is solid black with thin bare-skin gaps, and the blurred room behind keeps the focus on the leg.

Blackwork Geometric Thigh Calf Honeycomb Hexagon Line Band Geometric pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

On the ninth morning of the thaw the bees would not fly toward the palace, so Mother Orla sent her grandson down the hill to see why. Tobin took the lantern, a pot of salt and the long iron knife his father had used for cutting boundary stones, because that was the custom when the hives went wrong.

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The palace of Harrow Vale had been built the year the old king discovered that honey tasted better when it was counted. Every cell in the great comb of his hall stood for something in the realm: one cell for each sack of barley, one for each ewe, one for each household that paid. Tobin had heard the tax-men boast of it at the well. Each spring they came down to the cellars, lifted the combs and scraped out what the bees had stored, and the bees went quiet for a while, then began again.

Down in the cellars the hives were dark and the air tasted of smoke. Tobin found the bees not in their boxes but on the wall, massed in straight bands across the stone, working in lines like soldiers on parade. They had raised a honeycomb the length of his arm over the mouth of the drain, and every cell was sealed with new wax. He understood then. The tax-men had taken everything the bees made, so the bees had made a count of their own, one cell for each lie the king had told. There were more cells than he could number before the lantern guttered.

He did not touch the honey. He laid a line of salt along the place where the bands met the drain, as his father had taught him for ending a quarrel over a fence, and sat down on an upturned crate to wait. By dusk the bees had left the cellars for the palace windows, and the king woke to a humming that did not stop. In the morning the tax-men found their ledgers sticky with wax and every page counted twice.