Black and grey line drawing of two peonies, leaves and buds with two bees, in a botanical hatched engraving style, shown as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peony bouquet with bees

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows two large peony blooms with layered petals, several buds and leaves, and two bees, one near the upper right and one at the left. The petals and leaves are built from fine hatching and cross-hatching, with darker shading at the flower centres and beneath the leaves. It is rendered in black ink on a flat mid-grey background, with the bouquet arranged in a loose diagonal composition.

Botanical Peony Bee Flower Leaf Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had been told the peonies would not survive the wet spring, and he had said nothing, only gone out each morning with a bucket of rainwater and a bent spoon for loosening the clay. The garden below the north wall belonged to the infirmary, and the infirmary had no use for flowers that sulked. Still, by late May the bushes had put up their heavy red heads, and the bees had found them before anyone else did.

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The bees were the abbot's concern, not Anselm's, though the abbot was seventy-three and rarely left his cell. Every hive on the monastery's three terraces had been counted twice that month, and the count came out one short. A young novice named Tobias, who had a knack for noticing what others walked past, followed the missing bee's dusty hum across the cloister, through the laundry, and out into the lane where the peonies leaned over the gate. He found the hive's queen not in a box but tucked under a bloom the size of a cabbage, drowsing in the gold dust at its heart.

He came back for Anselm with his sleeves muddy and his face bright. "She has taken the best one," he said. Anselm pretended to be cross, then went and looked. The flower was spilling its petals like the folds of a good wool coat, and the queen had settled in as if she had paid rent.

They left her there. At compline Anselm said the usual prayers, and when the bell rang for matins he found the lane gate propped open with a stone, so that every bee in the place could come and go as it liked.