Black silhouette of a bare tree with fine branches and three flying birds tattooed across a woman's shoulder and upper arm.

Bare tree and birds on a shoulder

Blackwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black silhouette of a leafless tree with fine, spreading branches runs from the upper arm up over the shoulder. Three small black birds in flight sit above it on the upper back, with the largest bird near the top of the shoulder blade. The tattoo is black ink only, photographed against warm skin with a grey strap top and the subject's back turned to the camera.

Blackwork Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Tree Bare tree Bird Flying bird Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sycamore on the ridge above Hollin Farm dropped its leaves a fortnight early, and Mags Tulloch took it as a personal insult. She stood at the gate with the milk churns stacked behind her and watched three rooks lift off the top branches like sparks off a bonfire. Her son had gone down to the mills in the valley for work, and his letters came less often each winter.

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The men in the Brindle Arms claimed the first Tulloch planted that tree the year the flood took the lower meadows, and that nobody had ever counted its branches. That November Mags climbed it with a pruning saw, meaning to take a dead limb for the range, and found a tin box wedged in the fork. Its lid was rusted shut, and something inside rattled against the tin.

She carried it down to the kitchen and opened it with a bread knife. Inside lay a folded map of the valley, pencilled with a route through the hills to the railway halt at Cairnby, and a note in her grandmother's cramped hand: The birds go where the branches point. Mags read it twice, then sat down hard on the flagstones and laughed until she cried.

At dusk she went back to the gate and waited. The rooks came home to the sycamore, and then, one by one, they lifted again and flew along the bare arm of the tree, southeast, toward the cutting where the trains ran. She wrote the halt's name on the back of his last letter, then pinned the map above the range, where the heat would keep it soft enough to unfold.