Black tattoo of a bare branch with three small birds in flight, placed on a woman's upper chest near the collarbone.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bare branch and three birds on a collarbone

Botanical · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black silhouette of a leafless branch sweeps diagonally across the upper chest, tapering to a thick base at the left. Three small birds sit on and fly above the branch tips toward the right. The image is in black ink only, shown against warm skin, with the shoulder and a dark top strap framing the composition.

Botanical Chest Branch Tree Bird Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last train to Carrick Moss had gone at ten past eleven, and the platform lamp above bay two buzzes like a trapped wasp. You are sweeping crisp packets off the bench when Dilys Parry, the stationmaster, calls down from the booking office window that there is a bird in the waiting room. A starling got in through the broken pane and has been perched on the ticket machine since teatime.

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You find it on the ledge above the timetable, a small grey thing with its head tucked under one wing. Beyond the glass, the old ash the railway planted when the line was new has shed the last of its leaves. Its branches reach across the cutting like cracks in ice. You prop the door wide and lift the broom handle toward the bird, and it goes in one hard shove of air, past the signal and over the branch tips. Two more birds lift from the sleeper stacks to follow it.

Dilys is waiting with two cups of tea that have gone cold. She asks whether you'll take the early for Hexworth. You say your sister has a spare room and a kettle that works. She laughs and says the tree will still be standing when you're back. You tell her you hope so, because it's the only one for miles the wind hasn't bothered to pull up.

On the platform the signal drops with a clack, and you look back once. The ash is bare against the lamplight, and three small birds are sitting out along its longest limb, waiting for a train that hasn't been called yet.