Black and grey dotwork drawing of a bee with outspread wings and honeycomb patterns across its head, thorax and abdomen, shown on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dotwork bee with honeycomb details

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A front-on, symmetrical bee with four outspread wings, long antennae and jointed legs, drawn in fine stippled dots and clean outlines. The thorax and abdomen are decorated with hexagonal honeycomb cells, small dotted motifs and banded stripes, giving the insect a patterned, ornamental look. The bee is centred on a plain white background in black ink only.

Dotwork Bee Insect Honeycomb Hexagon Wing Antennae Stripe

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

Four in the morning and the proving drawer is still warm when the bee comes in under the back door, the way it has every morning this week. Mrs Okafor's sourdough is rising in its baskets along the rack and I am dusting them with rice flour, the only job Dad ever let me do before he went into hospital. The bee settles on the scale, unhurried, its four wings folded flat as paper.

Keep reading

I have tried to shoo it out twice. Dad would have caught it in a jam jar and carried it to the yard, but I have no patience for jars. Instead I counted the pale bands across its abdomen and the little dotted rings along its back, as if someone had pressed a pin into the ink one speck at a time. When I looked closer at its chest, the pattern was honeycomb, every cell the same size, and I wondered whether the hives on the canal warehouse roof had been feeding on the lime trees for longer than the bakery had been open.

On Friday I left the shutter up and wedged the back door with a brick. At ten past five it walked along the flour sacks, lifted, and went out low over the car park towards the water. I wrote the order sheet with its scent still on my wrists. The honey for the glaze came from those roof hives, and I had never once thought to ask.

This morning the loaves came out of the oven with a faint grid pressed into the crust where I had laid a dusted linen over the baskets. Mrs Okafor held one up to the window and said it looked as though the bee had been sitting on it. I did not tell her I had let it in. I cut the first slice while it was still warm and left the heel on the sill for the bee.