Small bee tattoo in fine line style with yellow and black striped abdomen and grey shaded wings, sitting on a area of skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small bee tattoo on skin

Fine line · Other · Mixed · Photo

A small bee in flight is tattooed on the skin, shown from above with its wings spread and legs and antennae extended. The linework is fine and dark, with stippled grey shading on the wings and body. Warm yellow fills the bands of the abdomen, which stand out against the surrounding skin tone.

Fine line Other Bee Insect Wing Stripe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Anwen Tallis drove a water cart on the Sallow Flats road, and in the eighth month of drought she found a bee sitting on the seat beside her. It had come out of a crate of melons at the depot in Harrow Wells. Nobody had seen a bee that far from the hives in three years. Its wings were smoked glass, veined so finely that a man could read them, and its body had two bands the colour of old brass.

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The road ran forty miles without a well. Anwen talked to the bee because the silence got into the engine. She told it about her brother, who had gone north for work and sent no letters, and the bee walked slowly along the dashboard as if it were listening. At the forty-mile marker the cart stalled. The barrels were low and the sun stood straight overhead. The bee lifted, circled twice, and went off over the scrub at an easy pace, as though it knew the way.

Anwen followed on foot, pulling the cart by its rail. She had no reason to trust a bee, but the hum led her to a dry gully where a creosote bush was flowering yellow in the wrong month. Beneath it, in a cracked hollow, lay a seep of water no wider than a saucer, and a swarm clinging to the wet stones.

She drank from her cupped hands and filled both barrels by spoon, which took until dusk. When the road cooled she drove on, and the bee rode back on the dashboard until the lights of Harrow Wells showed. Her brother was waiting at the depot gate, thinner than she remembered. He asked where she had got such a fine bee buzzing round the cab. She told him the road had lent it to her. He didn't laugh.