Hand-drawn coloured illustration of a bumblebee in flight with hatched black and yellow banding and translucent wings on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bumblebee illustration in yellow and black

Mixed · Flash

A single bumblebee is drawn in profile from above, with a black head and thorax, yellow bands across the thorax and abdomen, and a white tail. Fine pen hatching defines the segments and legs, and the wings are rendered in pale tan with delicate veining. The subject sits centrally on a plain white background with generous margins.

Bee Insect Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The letter came to the vicarage in March, addressed in a hand nobody in Little Hadley recognised, and Margery Pollock opened it on the back step because the kettle had not yet boiled. Inside was a single sheet of squared paper and a pressed clover. The writer, a Mrs Ada Ferrier of Dunmere, asked whether the parish still kept the old custom of telling the bees. Her husband had died in January. Nobody had told the hives.

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Margery remembered the custom only in fragments. Her grandmother had knocked three times on each skep and said the news aloud, so the bees would not sulk and leave. She went down the lane that afternoon with a tin of sugar lumps and a torn scrap of hymn book, and found Mrs Ferrier's hives behind a wall of cracked brick, where a row of straw domes sat in the sun. The woman stood at the gate in a wool coat, watching Margery's hands.

Margery knocked three times and spoke the words her grandmother had used, and then, because they seemed thin, she added the name of the man who had kept the bees, and the field where he had sown his beans, and the year he had won the ribbon at Coventry. A bumblebee came out of the hedge, slow and fat with its bands of yellow, and circled the straw twice before settling on the lintel. Mrs Ferrier made a small sound and wiped her eyes with the back of her glove.

The bee stayed on the stone while they talked about nothing in particular. When Margery finally rose to go, it lifted and drifted over the wall, unhurried, the way a man walks home from a pub he is not quite ready to leave.