Black ink drawing of a bumblebee with hatched shading on its body and veined wings, with a small letter B beneath it on textured white paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ink bee drawing with the letter B

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed black ink drawing of a bumblebee in side-on, top-down view, with fine hatching across the striped abdomen, legs and head. The veined wings are outlined in thin, delicate strokes, and the bee is shown in profile with its legs spread. A small capital letter B sits below the insect on a textured off-white paper surface, with no colour used.

Fine line Bee Insect Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit closer, because the pipe is out and I won't light it twice. A bumblebee came aboard the Persephone Vane at Gravesend, tucked in a crate of Kentish russets, and nobody saw it come. There was not a flower on the whole ship, only tar, salt pork and the smell of wet rope, so the poor thing should have died within its first hour.

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It was ship's boy Tobias Crane who found it, crawling slow across the biscuit tin in the dog watch. He was eleven and had never been further than the Medway. He warmed it in his cupped hands, fed it sugar water off the end of a spoon, and kept it in his mother's snuffbox lined with a handkerchief. Captain Hardcastle wanted it over the side. Miss Ada Lowe, a widow bound for Valparaíso with a crate of pressed ferns, asked for it instead. She spent three evenings at the cabin table drawing it with a steel nib, and beneath it she wrote a small B so the boy would know whose it was.

Off the Horn the wind turned savage, and for nine days the ship did not see the sun. The bee grew stronger in the warmth of the galley range, and the boy began to think it would be the one thing aboard that did well by the voyage. On the tenth morning the sky cleared to a hard blue, the snuffbox lid lay open on the deck, and the handkerchief was empty.

Tobias searched the rigging until the bosun swore at him. Miss Lowe said nothing, but she folded her drawing into his hand on the last evening before Valparaíso. He kept it in his shirt for the rest of his life. And on every calm evening after, he swore he heard a hum over the rail, though the nearest flower was a thousand miles away.