Black and grey dotwork honey bee tattoo with veined wings on the inner forearm, shown in a black and white photograph.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Honey bee tattoo on an inner arm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A honey bee is shown from above with outspread wings, antennae and legs. The body and head are built up with stippled dots, while the wings are outlined with fine lines and veining. The bee sits centrally on pale skin, with a dark knitted sleeve and a wooden floor visible in the background.

Dotwork Forearm Bee Insect Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swarm came over the allotments on the second Tuesday of June, a brown cloud that thickened above the bakery roof until the whole of Pennick Lane stopped to look up. Mr Hollis was already on the ladder with his veil knotted at the collar and an empty skep under one arm. "Hold the sheet, Nell," he said, "and don't stare. They can tell when you're frightened."

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The queen had settled on the washing line behind the vicarage, a dark knot the size of a fist, and the workers crawled over her in a slow shifting coat. I shook the branch the way he had shown me, and the whole mass dropped into the sheet with a sound like wet sand poured onto cloth. Mrs Dunn came out to her gate with her arms folded and warned us the bees would be in her pillows by teatime. Hollis only laughed and tipped the skep.

He had kept bees for forty years on the hill above the reservoir, and he said a swarm always knew where it was going before the keeper did. That evening, while we scraped wax from the frames in his kitchen, he showed me the old logbook where his wife had pressed a single wing between two pages, the veins as fine as cracked glaze. He did not say anything about it, and I did not ask. I passed him the honey knife instead.

By the next morning the swarm had moved from the sheet into the old skep in his orchard, and the hum carried across the lane like a kettle left on. Mrs Dunn came round at noon with her apron still on, sheepish and sharp at once, and asked whether a person could buy a jar. Hollis took one from the shelf, wrote on the label in careful capitals, and pressed it into her hands. It said WASHING LINE, JUNE, and she never once asked him to change it.