Close view of a small grey fine-line butterfly tattoo on skin, with a pale, raised bee-like outline beside it on the torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly and pale bee outline on skin

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A small grey fine-line butterfly with delicate wings sits in the upper right of the frame. To the lower left, a pale, raised outline of a bee or similar insect is visible, with a lighter tone that looks different from the surrounding skin. The image is a close, softly lit shot of bare skin with a dark fabric edge along the bottom right.

Fine line Other Butterfly Bee Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull your chairs in, because I'm not shouting this across the bottom of Tanner's Hill like a town crier. Mrs Hollins has heard it twice and says I get the bees wrong, so you can tell me if I do.

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The summer of 1953 the bees came down off the skep on Ada Pell's wall and went straight to the vicarage washing line, and nobody could coax them home. Ada was the one who sat in the nettles with a cup of sugared water until they settled. Her brother Frank, who had never sat still in his life, came up the lane that evening with a tin butterfly he'd cut from the lid of a toffee tin. He'd bent its wings so they'd catch the wind. Under his arm he carried a pane of chapel glass the glazier had thrown out, and on it he'd scratched a bee with a hatpin dipped in lemon juice. You couldn't see a thing in daylight. You had to hold it to the fire, and then there it was, brown and crooked, like something rising through water.

He went off to the Leeds mill the next Monday, and the letters stopped by Christmas. Ada kept the pane on the sill over the sink. Every evening she lit the range, held the glass up to the warm, and watched the bee come up out of it, and every morning the butterfly sat where she'd left it, lifting a little in the draught from the door as if it meant to go somewhere.

Last spring the vicar's boy came up the hill with a postcard from a Bradford hospital. Ada didn't open it at the table. She held it to the fire first, because that's how she always read things that mattered, and the writing came up brown along the edges. Then she took the butterfly off the sill and opened the door wide, and it went out over the hives as though it had been waiting all along.