Colour tattoo of a galaxy-filled honeycomb with a flower of life pattern and a golden bee on the left side of a ribcage.

Galaxy honeycomb and bee on ribs

Geometric · Ribs · Colour · Photo

The tattoo covers the side of the ribcage with a cluster of hexagons, each filled with a starry night sky in deep blue, violet and pink. Fine white linework traces a flower of life pattern across the centre, and a golden bee with detailed wings sits over the lower honeycomb cells. Soft gradients blend blue, pink and gold, and the composition tapers downwards in a diagonal stream of hexagons.

Geometric Ribs Honeycomb Hexagon Galaxy Star Flower of life Bee Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

...and that's why you never trust a honeycomb that's gone quiet at night, Tomas. Keep your palm flat on the lid and listen. My grandmother kept forty hives on the north shoulder of the island, below the lighthouse, where the keeper's wife hung washing that never dried. Her bees would not swarm in daylight. They waited for the dark, and then they rose past the lamp into the black, and they came back at dawn with their legs dusted silver.

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The winter the fog came in thick as wool, the lamp at the top of the tower failed twice in one night, and a fishing boat from Carrick was out beyond the rocks with four men aboard. The keeper climbed down shouting that nothing could be seen. My grandmother only tipped her head at the hives. She lifted the lids one by one, and the bees poured out, a river of gold, and they did not go to the light. They went to the stars that could not be seen, because they had learned them long ago, cell by cell, each hexagon of wax a little night sky they carried in their bodies.

The boat came in by the humming. The men swore afterwards that a bright bee hung over the water and led them round the teeth of the reef, wings opening and closing like a compass needle, until the shingle showed under the hull. Nobody thanked the bees. Nobody ever does. But the next morning my grandmother found the top row of her oldest comb sealed in fresh wax, and she never once cut it.

She left that cell open every year after, Tomas, one hexagon full of starlight and nothing else. Look, there, under the lid. That is the boat's place. You keep it empty so the sky remembers who came home.