Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a skull inside overlapping geometric circles and fine lines, with a small bee below, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull with geometric circles and a bee on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed human skull sits at the centre of overlapping thin circles and radiating fine lines, with small dots placed along the linework. The skull is shaded with stippled dots, giving it a textured, tonal look, and a small bee is drawn beneath it. The design is shown in black ink and grey tones on pale skin, with the forearm filling most of the frame.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Skull Bee Circle Geometric line Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm has taught you to read the bees before you read the psalms, and this morning you are kneeling at the hive on the south wall with your sleeve rolled to the elbow because the smoke has found its way under the lid. The old man is already walking back toward the cloister, his sandals slapping the wet flags, calling over his shoulder that the queen is in the third super and the honey will not wait for prayer.

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Under the lid you find the thing he warned you about. A comb has been built crooked across the frame, and in its hollow lies a skull no bigger than a walnut, scrubbed clean and dry, its teeth still set. Someone before you scratched a set of overlapping circles into the wood of the frame, faint as pencil, with lines radiating out from them like the spokes of a compass. You lift the skull out with two fingers and the bees do not stir, as though they have known it was there for years.

Anselm returns with the wax knife and watches you turn it over. He says the hives were set on the old charnel ground, that the infirmarian kept the bones of the plague year in a box, and that bees will take the dead into their work if nobody is quick enough to stop them. He does not tell you what to do with it. He only asks whether you have finished the frame, and you realise he has been waiting to see if you would put it back.

You set the skull on the wall beside the hive, where the noon sun will find it, and you go back to the comb with your hands steady. By vespers the honey is running gold through the cloth, and the little bee that works the crooked comb has gone quiet in the shadow beneath the stone.