Black line drawing of a stylised bee with butterfly-like striped wings, curled antennae and a patterned abdomen on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stylised bee with swirled antennae

Black and grey · Flash

A bold black outline drawing of an insect with butterfly-style wings and a bee-like body. The wings are filled with parallel stripes and bordered by ornamental curls, and the antennae end in spirals. The abdomen is decorated with dotted and scrolled patterns, and the image is shown in solid black ink on white with no shading.

Bee Butterfly Insect Swirl Wing Antennae Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hold your tea, you'll want both hands for this part. Sixty winters back, when the herring still came thick off Cromer, there was a boat called the Gentle Bess, and her skipper's daughter, Ada Wren, could sew a sail faster than any man in Lowestoft. The lads called her the bee, because she never stopped moving and she stung anyone who got in her road.

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One February the nets came up heavy with striped little wings. Not fish. Insects, dozens of them, tangled in the mesh as if somebody had dipped them in tar and combed them out with wire. Ada freed one, and it sat on her knuckle, fat-bodied and bright-eyed, its antennae curling up into little springs at the ends. It hummed a tune her mother used to sing over the bread. Her father swore on his mother's grave it was a warning from the devil. Ada tucked it inside her oilskin and said it was a sign of supper, and she was right, for the mackerel came in after it like children following a fiddler.

The fleet went out against a rising sea the next morning and came back with the best haul in a decade. Every net held. Her father never said another word against the creature, and the pattern on its back, dots and scrolls running like stitching, got painted onto every hatch cover in the harbour. Some say the thing flew off over the breakwater that day, wings striped like a deckchair. Some say it still goes out ahead of the boats, humming to the shoals.

So if you ever find a striped wing caught in your net at first light, don't laugh and don't swear. Pick it free, let it sit on your knuckle a while, and throw the net on the other side.