Small realistic bee on the upper back
Realism · Back · Colour · Photo
A small bee is tattooed on skin, shown in flight with its wings spread and its legs trailing. The body is shaded in orange, yellow and brown with dark stripes, and the wings are pale and translucent with soft grey shading. The bee sits near the centre of the frame against freckled skin, with a white bra strap visible at the bottom edge.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The bees of Mardle Hollow had never once swarmed toward the mill, and so when the miller's daughter Ilse went up the hill with a basket of rye and found a bee caught in a spider's thread, she did not know what to do with it. The thread was fine as hair and the bee was stuck fast by one foreleg, its gold body heaving. She thought of her grandmother, who said a bee freed from a web would owe the freer a favour, and who said also that bees keep count of everything.
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She sat down in the bracken and worked the thread loose with a fingernail, slowly, while the bee hummed at her and once knocked against her wrist. When it was free it did not fly off. It climbed onto the back of her hand, dragged its wings open, and stayed there long enough for her to see the light come through them, pale as the skin of an onion. Then it lifted, circled her head twice, and went down the hill toward the mill.
That autumn the miller's wheel stopped for want of water, and the village went hungry for a month. Ilse walked out each evening to the edge of the orchard and waited. On the last night of the frost a single bee came low over the grass, trailing its legs, and dropped a small wet comb of honey into her open palm before it wandered away into the dark. She ate it standing in the cold and did not count the days after that.
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