Black and grey engraved illustration of a bee with stippled shading and veined wings on a cream background, in the style of a tattoo flash design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Engraved bee illustration on cream

Black and grey · Flash

A top-down illustration of a bee with spread wings, antennae and six legs, centred on a plain cream background. The insect is drawn with fine hatching and stippled shading that defines the segmented abdomen, the eyes and the translucent wings. The design is rendered only in black and grey ink, with generous empty space around the subject.

Bee Insect Wing Antennae Leg Abdomen

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bees came to the bakery on Tallow Lane the week the lamplighter died, and nobody thought much of it until the bread stopped rising. Old Mrs Pennock, who kept the ovens, said they wanted a word with whoever held the keys to the city clock. Nobody believed her. She was ninety and had buried two husbands, and she said the bees were the only honest creatures left in Coldharbour.

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So at midnight, when the gas lamps had been turned down to blue, her grandson Tom climbed the iron stairs of St Ambrose tower with a jar of honey under his arm. The bell-ringer was asleep on a sack of coal. Above him the clock mechanism ticked like a heart in a cupboard, and wedged between the brass wheels was a single bee, a big one, its wings laid flat and grey as old paper. It did not move when he lifted the jar. It only turned its head towards the hour hand, as if reading it.

Tom understood then what the bees had been asking for. The clock had been running slow since the spring, and nobody had wound it properly, because the man who used to do it had gone off to the mills and never come back. He set the honey down on the ledge. He wound the key until his palms ached, and when the bell finally struck one, the bee lifted, circled the tower twice, and went out over the rooftops towards the river.

By morning the bread had risen. Mrs Pennock said nothing about it. She only left a heel of the new loaf on the step for the bee, which was long gone, though the honey jar on the ledge was empty by dawn.