Soft-shaded drawing of a bumblebee in flight, seen from the side, with yellow and black body and faint wing lines on cream textured paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bumblebee in flight drawing

Mixed · Flash

A single bumblebee is shown in side view, angled as if flying, with its legs tucked beneath and two wings sweeping back. The body is built up with soft, loose shading in black and yellow, and the wings are rendered in fine, feathered grey-black strokes. The bee sits alone on a pale, slightly textured cream background with plenty of open space around it.

Bee Insect Wing

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clover failed in the wet spring, and by midsummer the kingdom of Vellmere had only one hive that still hummed. You carry its last thimble of honey strapped beneath your jaw, a drop no bigger than a barleycorn, and you fly it east across the Pale Flats, where nothing grows that a bee could use. The grass there is the colour of bone. The sky is the colour of candle wax that has burned all night.

Keep reading

The wind lifts you and drops you again. Your wings are frayed at their edges from a year of hard flying, and they sweep back and catch the light like the ribbons on an old banner. You keep your legs tucked up tight so they will not snag on thistles, though there are no thistles. Twice you rest on a fence post, and each time you think of Queen Ysolde waiting in the glasshouse at Marrowgate, who has not tasted sweetness since the first frost.

The glasshouse doors stand open. Inside, the air smells of cut stone and nothing else. Ysolde sits among empty pots with her hands folded over a silver spoon. You settle on its rim and unstrap the thimble. She looks at the drop for a long time, then bends and breathes gently across it, so that it trembles but does not spill. When she straightens, she lifts a small crystal jar from beneath her skirts and tips a single bead of amber onto the spoon beside your thimble.

"Take this to them," she says. "Tell them the road is open." So you lift away with the wind behind you, two drops of gold heavy under your jaw, and you leave a faint thread of pollen hanging in the grey air over the Flats. Behind you, one by one, the others rise from the cracks in the stone to follow.