Two feet on a wooden deck, each with a small fine line bee and dotted flight trail tattooed on the top of the foot.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching bee tattoos on two feet

Fine line · Other · Mixed · Photo

Two bare feet rest on a weathered wooden deck, each with a small bee tattoo on the top of the foot and a dotted line trailing behind it. The bees have black outlines, grey wings and yellow and black stripes, drawn in fine, clean linework with little shading. The tattoos are similar in size and design, and the photograph is taken from above with soft, even daylight.

Fine line Other Bee Dotted line Feet Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are sitting on the bollard at the end of Saltmere quay with your bag between your knees, and the ferry is late again, which means Mrs Penhallow has time to tell you about her hip. Behind her a bee has got into the fish market and is bumping against the tin roof, looking for a way back to the hedge it came from. You watch it the way you have watched everything this week, as if it might be the last thing you see of the harbour.

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Your sister Ruth taught you to follow a bee home. You lean out and point, and she laughs and says you have to watch the line it draws, not the bee itself, because the bee only ever goes where the flowers are. Last summer the two of you drew that route on the back of an old chart with a ruler and a blunt pencil: the dotted path from the sea wall up to the allotments, round the church, and back down again. She inked a bee at each end of the line, one for each of you, and said that was how it would be, whichever side of the water you ended up on.

The ferry comes round the breakwater with its horn going. Ruth is not on it. She is on the other quay, waving a tea towel, because she could not bring herself to say goodbye at this end. Her message arrives as the gangway lifts: a photo of the chart pinned above her kettle, the pencil dots still there, and a new dotted line she has drawn from her side of the harbour out towards yours.

You put the phone away and find the bee again, settled on a crab pot, and trace the way it will go home with one finger in the air. It is a long way round. You decide, just this once, to follow it all the way.