Neo-traditional tattoo of a bumblebee with translucent amber wings, a green and black body and a cream face marking, shown on skin inside an oval frame.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bumblebee on skin

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A stylised bumblebee with translucent amber wings, a dark green and black thorax, and a cream face marking with a dark curl. Bold black outlines, smooth colour fills and soft shading on the fuzzy yellow-orange abdomen give it a dimensional look. The insect sits centre-frame within an oval crop on a black background, with two small black diamond shapes as decoration.

Traditional Other 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 honey crate came aboard at Rotterdam with a split lid, and by the second night out you are picking a bumblebee out of the sugar bin with a teaspoon. It is fat as a plum and no bigger than the end of your little finger, and it has got its back legs stuck in the syrup. You lift it onto the warm rim of the range, where it sits grooming its amber wings with the air of a passenger who has been overcharged.

Keep reading

The sea gets up in the Channel. Pans walk off their hooks, the kettle goes over, and you spend the middle watch wedging the flour tins with a folded tea towel while the bee clings to the brass rail above the stove. Chief Mate Pryce comes down soaked to the collar and asks what you are muttering at. You tell him you are talking to the bee. He says a cook with a bee for company will be serving wasps in the porridge by Friday, then eats two biscuits and goes back up.

By Thursday the bee has taken to the cool of the bread locker, and you have taken to leaving a thimble of thin sugar water on the shelf beside the stove where you can see it from the pans. You do not know what a bee is doing at sea. You suppose it came for the nectar and was kept by the wrong kind of weather, the way you were kept by the wrong kind of life ashore.

At Harwich the gangway goes down into a grey dawn smelling of diesel and cut grass from somewhere up the quay. You open the porthole, and the bee walks onto your thumb as if it had been waiting for the tide to turn. It lifts once, circles the mooring bollard, and goes off low over the fence towards a hedge of late bramble, the only thing aboard that ever knew where it was going.