Colourful tattoo of a bumblebee with pink, blue and yellow watercolour splashes on the side of an ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bumblebee with watercolour splashes on an ankle

Ankle · Colour · Photo

A bumblebee in flight sits on the side of an ankle, with dark outlines and shading on its body and translucent blue-grey wings. Soft splashes of pink, purple, blue and yellow ink spread outward from the bee, with small yellow dots trailing below it. The bee is the sharpest element and the splashes fade out softly across the pale skin.

Ankle Bee Wing Splash Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ansell kept her jars of rinse water on the vestry windowsill, and by the first week of June the bumblebee had found them. Nobody in Thorne Cross had seen a bee so fond of a jam jar. It hovered at the rim, dipped its furry belly into the cloudy water, and lifted away heavier than it came, so that when it bumbled across the allotments the air behind it blossomed pink, then blue, then a yellow like the inside of an egg.

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The children called it Paintbox. Mr Dunmore, who ran the seed shop, said it was a sign of something, though he never said what, and his wife said he had been sniffing turpentine again. Mrs Ansell only wanted her jars back. She had a memorial window due for the ferryman's widow, and the glass blue she needed had been swallowed in an afternoon by a creature that could not read a single word of the brief.

So on the Friday she sat on the vestry step with a sandwich and a clean jar and waited. The bee came down at noon, drank, and rose. She followed it as far as the lych gate, where it dropped a trail of small yellow dots along the flagstones. She traced them home, and they led her to the bench where she had left her brushes, and to the bee's own wet print on the blue glass she had propped there to dry.

By the end of the month she had finished the window. In one corner of the glass, a bumblebee hung in mid-air, drinking from a painted jar.