Black line drawing of eight cartoon bees with striped bodies and wings, scattered across a white flash sheet.

Eight cartoon bees on a flash sheet

Black and grey · Flash

A flash sheet showing eight small cartoon bees in profile, each with a rounded head, a single eye, stripes across the body, two antennae and a large wing. The bees are drawn in bold black outline with solid black stripes and no shading or fill. They are arranged loosely in a staggered pattern on a plain white background, all facing the same direction.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bees had been flying in the wrong direction since Tuesday, and Mrs Okonedo at the allotment gate said it was a sign. Halima said it was the wind. Her grandfather would have said nothing at all and gone on pruning the Bramley, so she pruned the Bramley herself, in the late August heat, while eight small bees bumbled in a loose crooked line above the rows of runner beans as if they had been sent to fetch something and forgotten what.

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The leader was the fattest, with a stripe that wobbled when he turned. He kept stopping mid-air to look back at the others, as if counting them, then sighing and carrying on. Halima decided he was called Gerald. Gerald led them past the shed, past the water butt, and straight into the open window of the Cooper twins' caravan, where there was a jam jar of lemonade gone warm and a dish of plums nobody had claimed.

Halima went round to fetch them back, expecting trouble, and found the bees hovering over the plum dish in perfect silence, each one with its antennae raised like a tiny audience. Gerald looked at her, then at the plums, then at her again, with the air of someone who had been right all along.

She left them to it. The Bramley could wait. Some things in an orchard were simply owed a little patience, and a dish of plums on a hot afternoon was one of them.

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