Colour realism tattoo of honeycomb, three bees and small flowers with the script words Order is peace on the side of a torso.

Honeycomb and bees with script on the side

Realism · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A cluster of golden honeycomb cells with three detailed bees and small flowers with green leaves sits on the side of the torso, with the script words Order is peace curving above them. The bees and script are outlined in dark ink, while the honeycomb uses soft orange and yellow shading with fine stippled texture. The composition places the honeycomb diagonally across the frame, with one bee drifting in the upper right.

Realism Botanical Ribs Honeycomb Bee Flower Leaves Script Quote

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Mrs Pryce kept nineteen hives behind the chapel at Lower Tallow, and every spring the village argued about them. The bees flew over the allotments, into the bakery, and once into the vicar's Sunday hat. Men wanted them gone. Mrs Pryce said the bees had only ever wanted what the village wanted, which was a straight row of cells and nobody shouting in the lanes.

Keep reading

The summer the mill burned, the quarrel came to a head. Harold Venn blamed the Dunmore brothers, the Dunmores blamed the bees, and by August there were two parties at the market cross, each with a list. Mrs Pryce set a comb on the cross's stone step, golden and cut square, and told them to count the cells. Every hexagon touched six others and no cell was wasted. "Nothing in there is waiting for anybody to be sorry," she said. "They just fit."

Nobody liked that answer, but the children took it up. They began drawing combs on the schoolroom slates and writing the words Mrs Pryce kept saying over the hives: order is peace. Harold came to the gate in September with a jar of his own honey, asking for a swarm for his orchard. She gave him one, and a sack of wax for the church candles, and asked him to bring the jar back empty.

The following spring the mill was rebuilt, the lanes were quiet, and a bee sat on the chapel gate in the sun, cleaning its wings, as if it had been told exactly where to be.