Realistic colour tattoo of a bumblebee in flight on the inner wrist, with yellow and black banding and shaded wings.

Realistic bumblebee on a wrist

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A detailed tattoo of a bumblebee sits on the inside of a wrist, shown from above with its legs and wings spread. The insect is shaded with fine gradients in black, grey and yellow, giving it a three-dimensional look. The bee sits centrally against plain skin, with a blurred grey top and red skirt in the background.

Realism Forearm Bee Insect Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The paperwork said forty colonies of Bombus terrestris, sealed in cardboard nucleus boxes, bound for a glasshouse nursery outside Canterbury. I had signed off on worse. What I had not signed off on was the bee walking up my wrist while I held the clipboard, slow and deliberate, as if it had read the regulations and found them lacking.

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Dev from the plant health team wanted the consignment held for seventy-two hours. A single worker loose in the wild would mean a fine and a letter with a crest on it. I said nothing about the bee. I carried it out past the yellow lines to the bins by the fence, where the wind came off the Channel and the lorries idled in their queue, and I opened my hand on the rail.

It did not go. It sat on my knuckle and cleaned its forelegs, as bees do, then lifted off in a loop that took in the fence, a van's wing mirror and the back of a coach from Lyon. My mother kept hives in Kent. She used to say a bumblebee cannot fly by the rules of aerodynamics and nobody has told it, so it goes anyway.

The colonies cleared at six. The nursery manager signed for them without looking up. Driving home I found one amber-banded worker in the footwell of my car, dozing on the rubber mat. I drove it all the way to the allotment and let it go on a bed of late lavender, and I wrote the time in my notebook, because nobody asks a customs officer to account for his bees, and so nobody else ever will.