Realistic shaded bumblebee tattoo in yellow, orange and grey on the inner forearm, with translucent wings spread out.

Bumblebee tattoo on the forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A bumblebee is shown in three-quarter view, with translucent wings spread, legs extended and a fuzzy thorax. The body has soft grey shading, orange and yellow bands, and dark segment lines that give it volume. The bee sits centred on the forearm against a slightly reddened patch of skin, with a plain background.

Realism Forearm Bee Insect Wing

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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

Right, you'll want the short version, because your colleague has already stamped my papers twice and keeps glancing at the queue behind me as if it owes him money. So sit on that crate and listen. The bee came over the river in my grandmother's hat, tucked beneath the brim where the black net had worn thin. Nobody searches a widow's hat. Nine days she rode there, hardly moving, her wings folded like wet tissue and her legs no thicker than hairpins.

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Every time the lorry braked she hummed, low and steady, the note you hear from a hive when the frost is coming. At the first barrier the officer lifted the brim with his biro to see what was underneath. The bee lifted too, all at once, and settled on the tip of the pen as neatly as if it had been expecting a flower. Grandmother held her breath. The officer held his. Then he studied the little furred body with its orange bands and grey shadowed belly, and he said there was no box on the form for bees.

He waved us through, and we drove past the wire fences and the flat fields with their tired poplars. When we stopped by the first meadow she wound down the window and the bee went out without a sound, bumbling off over the clover in that heavy, drunken way they have, as if the air were thick with honey. Grandmother said it was the only official business she had ever seen done properly.

She kept that hat on the back of the kitchen door until the day she died. Every June, without fail, a bumblebee would bump against the glass of the window above the sink, wanting in.