Colour cartoon bee tattoo with large eyes, antennae and blue-tinted wings, placed on the side of the body.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cartoon bee tattoo on skin

Fine line · Other · Colour · Photo

A cartoon bee with large glossy eyes, curled antennae and a rounded yellow body with black stripes. Thin black outlines define the shapes, and the wings are shaded pale blue. The bee faces left against plain skin, with the design filling most of the frame.

Fine line Other Bee Insect Antennae Wing Cartoon Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Penhallow found the bee on the windowsill of the dairy the morning after the first hard frost, sitting upright on the cold stone with its antennae curled like the tips of a shepherd's crook. It was the wrong time of year for a bee. Everyone on the farm knew that. The hives at the top of the orchard had been wrapped in sacking since Michaelmas, and the colony inside would be packed into a ball no bigger than a cabbage, shivering their wings to keep the queen warm until the crocuses came.

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She did not throw it out. She had lost a husband to the fever and a son to the sea, and she had learned that small things left on windowsills were usually asking for something. She fetched a thimble of honey from the crock and set it down beside the bee. The bee leaned over it with its great glossy eyes and looked up at her as if it had been waiting its whole life for exactly that.

The bee stayed through the dark months. It rode in the pocket of her apron to the well, sat on the rim of the feed bucket while she counted hens, and each evening it flew the length of the kitchen and back, humming a note that set the copper pans ringing. The neighbours said the old widow had gone soft. Then in February a fox got into the orchard and tore the sacking from the top hive, and the bees that had been huddled there came down the hill in a rush of gold, following the one on her windowsill.

In March the first crocus opened against the orchard wall. The bee went back up the hill without looking round, and Mrs Penhallow kept the thimble on the sill, because it seemed a shame to waste a good thimble.