Black and grey fine line tattoo of connected hexagons forming a honeycomb pattern across the side of a hip.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Honeycomb hexagon tattoo on a hip

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a row of outlined hexagons that link together like a honeycomb, spreading from left to right and narrowing into a stepped, cell-like chain. The linework is thin and even, with the hexagons left unshaded so the skin shows through. The photograph is black and white, with the tattoo set against smooth skin and a sheer white fabric at the edge of the frame.

Fine line Geometric Other Honeycomb Hexagon Geometric pattern Outline

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

The swarm came off the balcony rail on the third Tuesday of June, and by then Uncle Bashir had been dead nine days and the council had sent two letters about the hive. I stood on the fourteenth floor of Harcourt House with a borrowed veil on my head, watching a bulk of brown bees hang from the washing line like a dropped coat.

Keep reading

He had kept bees up here for thirty years, against every clause in the tenancy agreement. He taught me to read comb the way other men read the racing pages: cells are always six-sided because that costs the least wax for the most room, and a good colony builds in a row when it is running out of space. 'Nothing wasted,' he used to say, tapping the frame. 'Look how they fit together. Nobody tells them where to go.'

I found the old comb in the bottom box, the one he had sealed with masking tape. Pale hexagons, one stepping down over the next, and at the far end a single cell he had drawn on the lid in biro, a little ring with a stroke through it. Underneath he had written: Give them the stair. So I carried the empty super down the back stairwell, floor by floor, and set it on the bench in the courtyard, where the lime tree was in flower and the hum could reach the park.

By dusk the bees had found it. I watched them cross the car park and the bins in one long unbroken line, following a path no map would have shown me, dropping to the lime a floor at a time, until the last of them tucked under the lid and the stairwell went quiet again. I did not sleep that night. I kept thinking of Bashir's hexagons, how they meet at their edges without anyone measuring, and how a building can be a hive too if you leave the door open.