Traditional-style flash design on paper showing two oval portraits with honeycomb, bees, a flying saucer and an atom, above two scrolled banners in colour.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two illustrated portraits with banners and bees

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A printed tattoo flash design on white paper, showing two oval portrait medallions with a honeycomb and bee motif behind each. The right medallion includes a starry night sky, a cross and an atom, and the left shows a flying saucer over a landscape. Bold black outlines and flat colour fills in blue, yellow, red and green sit above two scrolled banners, with a small flower below each.

Traditional Portrait Bee Honeycomb Flying saucer Star Cross Banner Flower Night sky

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Margery Shales had counted the bees twice before the band struck up, and both times the count came to nine, which meant the hive on the Stanton roof was thinking about swarming. She kept her eyes on the sash windows of the Wren Street dance hall instead, where the blackout paper had been pulled down for the summer and the moon came in sideways over the sprung floor.

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Walter Fenn, who ran the projector at the Odeon and fancied himself a scientist, had told her on Tuesday that the lights over Gallow Moor were not searchlights. He kept a notebook of them, sketched in pencil: saucers with rims like hat brims, hanging over the wheat without a sound. He wanted to show her. She wanted to dance, and said so, and he laughed and asked her for the foxtrot instead.

Halfway through the third number the lamps flickered, and every head turned to the high windows, where a pale disc slid across the stars and stopped above the car park. Walter let go of her hand. Margery did not stop dancing. She took his notebook from his jacket pocket as the floor cleared, turned to a clean page, and drew the thing exactly as it hung there, then wrote beneath it in her neat schoolroom hand: I want to believe.

Outside, the bees had gone quiet, the way they do before weather. She handed Walter his notebook at the cloakroom door, and it was only later, lying awake with the window open, that she noticed the hum above the chimney was not bees at all, but a long low note, rising and settling, as if something up there was dancing too.