Pencil drawing of nine skull details framed in a honeycomb of hexagons, a design sketch for a tattoo with no body placement shown.

Skulls arranged in a honeycomb hexagon grid

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing on paper shows nine hexagons arranged in a honeycomb pattern, each framed by a double outline. The hexagons contain close-up skull details, including a brow, eye sockets, a nasal area and several jaws with teeth, shaded in soft graded greys. The composition is centred on the sheet, with a 4B pencil placed to the right for scale.

Realism Geometric Skull Hexagon Honeycomb Bone Teeth Pencil drawing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hold your cups still, the bit about the skulls is coming, and you'll want your hands warm for it. Agnes Thwaite kept nine skeps on the south slope above this inn, and in the hard winter the pass shut she kept them the only way she knew, walking out through the drifts each morning to knock the snow from their roofs. The men below thought her soft in the head. She didn't argue. Her bees were the only thing on that mountain still making anything.

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That was when the old carrier, Abel Crake, came down off the fell half-dead with a sack over his shoulder. Nobody asked what was in it. He set it by the hearth and it clinked like crockery, and when Agnes opened it there were six skulls, sandy-white and no bigger than windfall apples, dug from a drowned chapel where the river had cut its bank. Abel said they were the monks who kept bees there before the Dissolution, and that a hive will not thrive while the dead lie unburied. Agnes laughed at him. Then she went quiet, and carried the skulls out to the slope in the blue dark.

She set each one at the mouth of a skep, eye sockets turned to the entrance, and by morning the bees had walked into those hollows and laid wax across the brow bones in neat six-sided cells, layer on layer, until every skull looked like it was wearing a honeycomb for a crown. Nobody could say how it happened. The honey came out dark as peat and tasted of cold iron, and that winter the snow stopped at the fence line as if someone had told it to.

So when you go up in the spring and find a skull on the wall of the top skep, don't be frightened. Those are only the bees keeping the house tidy. Mind the step on your way out, Dorothy. It's loose.