Black ink dotwork drawing of a honeybee with stippled shading, set on a hexagonal honeycomb grid, shown as a tattoo design sketch.

Honeybee over a honeycomb grid

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A honeybee is drawn in top-down view with antennae, striped abdomen, outstretched legs and veined wings. The body and wings are shaded with fine stippled dots, and the bee sits on a pencilled honeycomb of hexagons. The drawing is in black ink only, with two marker pens resting in the top right corner.

Dotwork Bee Honeycomb Hexagon Insect Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, and mind the kettle, because this is the story of Dobrin, who kept the gate at Tallow Bridge and counted everything twice. Each evening his lips moved over the carts as they rolled past, flour and salt and goose feathers, and each evening he wrote the numbers in a ledger with a pen that smelled of pine resin.

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One dusk a carter named Ivo Marr came up the road with a crate of straw on his cart and a sketchbook under his arm. "Anything to declare?" Dobrin asked. "Only the weather," said Ivo, "and a few hexagons I have been meaning to sell." He opened the book. Every page held the same pattern of cells, drawn in fine black ink, each one shaded with a thousand small dots so the paper seemed to hum. Dobrin turned the pages for a long time. Then he noticed a bee on the carter's collar, walking the seam with the patience of someone who has been told where the gate is.

"That is livestock," Dobrin said. "A single bee is no livestock," said Ivo. "She is a lodger. Her mother was the last queen of the old hives on the north slope. The hives were sold for debts, and somebody has to carry the line across." Dobrin wrote nothing down. He had no duty on lodgers, and the book said so, in his own handwriting, from his father's time.

He waved the cart through. The next morning Dobrin found a smear of honey on the ledger's brass clasp, and a single pale cell pressed into the page where his pen had rested. He never told anyone. He counted it, though, every evening, twice.