Black fine line honeycomb tattoo on the inner wrist and a small black line drawn bee on the palm, with a dotted trail leading towards it.

Honeycomb on wrist and bee on palm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows two black ink tattoos on one hand: a honeycomb of interlinked hexagons on the inner wrist and a small bee on the palm. Both are drawn in thin, even outlines with no shading, and a trail of fine dots runs across the palm from the bee. The image is taken straight on against a dark background, so the subject fills the frame.

Fine line Geometric Forearm Hand Honeycomb Hexagon Bee Dotted line Palm Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourselves down on the coal, the lot of you, and mind the hives, because the girls don't care for lads who stamp. Nan Cotterill kept nine hives strapped to the cabin roof of the Thistle, and she'd not shift them for love nor the lock-keeper. Every spring she took the boat up the Oxford line to the orchards past Braunston, bees humming up top like a chapel choir that had got its hymn book wet.

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The winter the fog came down thick as porridge, she lost her bearings on the long pound below Napton. Her eyes were no good by then, so she pricked the route into the heel of her hand with a sail needle and a pot of soot: one dot for each lock, one for the bridge with the broken rail, one for the bend where the chapel bell rang wrong. A bee, she always said, reads a line the way a bargee reads a towpath. The honeycomb she inked on her wrist so her pulse would keep to the same sense as the comb, nothing wasted and no corner that didn't earn its keep.

One of the girls got lost in that fog, a stray that wouldn't leave the boat, and I swear she was circling the tiller for an hour. Then she dropped onto Nan's open palm, walked the dotted line like a clerk reading a ledger, and went ahead of us through the grey, stopping at every lock until we came out under the hive lid at Stoke Bruerne.

That autumn we cut the comb, and it came out in little rooms, every one six-sided, not a single round one among them. Nan said that's the only way to keep a house when you've nothing to spare for corners. Now get your tea, and mind the sting.