Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a peony, a honeybee and a faceted gem on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peony, bee and gem on an upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large peony bloom sits at the top of the arm, with a realistic honeybee in the centre and a faceted gem with leaves below it. Fine stippled dotwork builds the petals, wings and body of the bee, while the gem uses clean outlines and light shading. The palette is entirely black and grey against pale skin, and an ornamental scroll is partly visible at the lower edge.

Dotwork Botanical Upper arm Peony Flower Bee Gem Diamond Leaves Ornament Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hives had been lashed to the mainmast since Madeira, and Hester Vell counted the hum each morning before she counted anything else. Forty-one skeps of straw, wrapped in sailcloth against the spray, each one a small weather of its own. The bees cared nothing for the sea. Mr Abbott, the ship's surgeon who had paid for the passage, cared only for the peony cuttings wedged in tin buckets along the rail, pink-headed and fat, and for the little glass jars of honey he meant to sell in Sydney.

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On the thirty-third day a squall split the sky open, and the cook's boy came running to say the foremast had gone. Hester went below with the hive keys in her apron pocket. She found a single worker bee crawling across the cargo ledger, its wings furred with salt, dragging itself toward the lamp as if the lamp were a flower. She cupped it in her palm and felt it walk the lines of her hand, slow and deliberate, the way her father had once stippled a leaf for an engraver in Bristol, dot by dot, until the shadow grew out of nothing.

When the sea settled she carried the bee back up the companionway and set it on the lid of the nearest hatch. It rested there a long while. Then it lifted, circled the mainmast twice, and dropped toward the rail where the peonies stood. Abbott wanted it swatted. Hester told him a bee that crossed an ocean deserved a flower at the end of it, and that was the end of the argument.

Off the Cape the buds opened, two of them, heavy and dark as wet velvet. The bee came back every afternoon to work them. Hester wrote the day in her log beneath the distance run, and drew it small in the margin, every line built from dots.