Black and grey realism tattoo with red watercolour splashes showing a twin-engined bomber and several bees inside a circle, on the thigh.

Bomber plane and bees in a target circle

Realism · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A twin-engined propeller bomber flies diagonally across a circular crosshair-style target, with three smaller bees inside the circle and a large bumblebee sitting below it. The aircraft and insects are rendered in soft black and grey shading with fine detail on the wings and fur, while loose red watercolour washes and ink splatters fill the background. The composition is dynamic, with the plane's wings extending beyond the circle and the large bee anchoring the lower edge of the design.

Realism Thigh Aeroplane Bee Watercolour Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the Thursday the bees had found the hatch. My father said they had come off the hives at Thornby Lane the morning after the aircraft came down in Bell's top field, and that a swarm will follow a scent it likes even through smoke, even through the stink of scorched fabric and spilt fuel. He stood at the field gate with his veil folded over one arm and would not go any closer.

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The crew had been three men from Canada and two from Leeds, and the nose gunner, a lad called Wilf Ashdown, had kept a notebook of bees. Nobody in the village knew this until his mother came up from Hastings in the autumn with a cardboard box of his things. Inside was a pencil drawing of a bumblebee, labelled in his careful hand: the big one sits low and does not mind the flak. Underneath he had written the rule his dad taught him. Never swat a bee in the air. Let it finish its circle.

Mrs Ashdown asked my father whose the bees in the hatch were. He said they were nobody's, that bees belonged to the field and the field to whoever sowed it, and that the plane had only been crossing over on its way to somewhere else. She nodded as if that settled something between them.

We left the swarm alone that summer. By September the comb in the hatch had gone gold and clean, and the bees had gone to the old oak by the church. The only one that stayed was a fat bumblebee that circled the scorched patch where the nose had come to rest, round and round, as if it were keeping a count of something nobody else could see.