Black and grey dotwork tattoo of two honey bees with detailed wings on a shoulder and upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two bees on a shoulder

Dotwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

Two honey bees are tattooed on the shoulder and upper back, one angled up towards the neck and the other lower and turned to the right. The bodies are shaded with stippled dots and fine banded lines, while the wings are drawn with delicate outlines and vein detail. The image is black and white, with the skin and the tattoo filling most of the frame against a dark background.

Dotwork Shoulder Bee Insect Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bees had been in Mrs Pargeter's hives since before the war, and nobody in Alder Cross could remember them swarming until the spring the mayor's wife came round asking for a jar of honey for the harvest supper. Ada Pargeter told her the honey was spoken for. Then she went out to the orchard with a tin of biscuits and a clean spoon and knocked on each hive, the way her mother had taught her, to tell the colonies who had died. Nobody had died that year, so she told them about the new postman instead, a sour man with a limp who hated dogs.

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The younger of the two Harrow brothers came up the lane that evening with his shirt torn at the shoulder. He had been stung three times on the way from the station, he said, by bees that seemed to be following him, and he wanted to know whether a person could be made to pay for a thing like that. Ada looked at the welts on his neck and told him bees did not hold grudges. They simply went where they were needed. He laughed at that, not kindly, and asked her why she was still talking to a dead man's hives.

She did not answer him. She went inside and fetched the old ledger from the dresser, where her husband had written the names of every colony and the date each one first swarmed. At the bottom of the last page, in his careful hand, was a line she had never read aloud. It said the bees would leave when the house stopped being honest, and that he had asked them to stay for her.

In the morning the hives were quiet, and two large bees sat on the sill of the back door, wings still as paper, facing opposite ways as though they had agreed on something and were waiting to see who would go first.