Black and grey flash design of a bee over a Roman numeral clock face, topped by a crown, with Queen Bee in script beneath.

Queen Bee clock and crown design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

The design shows a bee with outstretched wings centred on a clock face with Roman numerals, a crown above and the words Queen Bee in flourished script below. The bee and crown use fine linework and stippled dotwork shading, while the clock uses bold solid numerals and a segmented outer ring. The drawing is entirely black ink on a white background, with no colour.

Dotwork Bee Clock Crown Roman numeral Script

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At the bridge at Varnel the clock over the customs hut had stopped at ten to four, and the guards had long since stopped asking why. Every morning the bees came over the river from the orchards on the far bank, a grey cloud that thickened above the wooden barrier, and every morning the sergeant, a man called Dobrin Halas, waved them through with his cap.

Keep reading

One autumn a merchant came over with a cart of honey he had not declared. He had packed it under sacks of dried lavender and he laughed when Halas asked for his papers. The bees, he said, were only insects, and they could not read a ledger. Halas said nothing. He walked to the foot of the tower, climbed the iron ladder to the old mechanism, and found a single bee, fat and slow, crawling over the brass wheels where the hour hand had bent.

Halas cupped it in his palm and carried it down to the cart. It climbed the merchant's sleeve and settled on his collar. By dusk it had brought a hundred others, and they crowned the merchant's hat and walked the lids of his jars, reading the lie in the honey the way they read a flower. The merchant sat all night in the lavender with his hands held out from his body, and in the morning he was found wrapped in his own coat, still counting the stings.

The clock started again the next week, though nobody had wound it. It struck ten to four, and the bees crossed the river as they always had. The old women at Varnel said there was a queen living in the tower, who kept the hour for her people and collected what was owed to her, and that Dobrin Halas had never once been stung.