Small black and grey bee tattoo in fine line and dotwork style on the inside of a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small bee on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small bee seen from above, with outlined wings, a rounded head and antennae drawn in thin single lines. The striped abdomen is built up with stippled dots, giving soft shading between the bands. The tattoo sits centrally on pale skin against a dark, softly blurred background.

Fine line Dotwork Forearm Bee Insect Wing Stripe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bee found the marquee before the vicar did. It slipped in under the flap where the caterers had propped the door, a fat, unhurried thing, and went straight past the trifle and the bottles of prosecco to settle on the top tier of the cake. Maureen had spent three weekends sugar-piping that cake, and she had given the bride's father a look as if the bee were his fault.

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I keep bees on the allotment behind the chapel, so I was the one who got up. Ray always said a bee won't sting you if you don't flap at it, and I had sixty years of marriage to prove him right about most things. Two of the bridesmaids were already on their feet, and the youngest was standing on a chair. I walked over slowly, the way you do, and the bee looked at me with that black-eyed patience they have. I could see the yellow pollen packed on its back legs, the colour of the bramble flowers that grow along the old railway bank where we scattered Ray's ashes.

I cupped my hands around it and carried it out past the coconut shy to the lavender by the gate. For a moment it sat on my knuckle, cleaning its face the way a cat does, and then it lifted off and hung in the air above the hedge, as if it was deciding something. I thought it would go back to the hives on the allotment, but it turned and came straight back over the car park towards the marquee.

When I went back in, the bride was laughing with her veil pushed up over her hair. She said the bee could stay for the first dance if it behaved itself. I told her Ray would have said it had come to check who was marrying whom, and she said that seemed fair enough, provided it kept its distance from the cake.