Black bare tree tattoo running from the shoulder down the upper arm, with three birds in flight across the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bare tree and birds on a shoulder

Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with her back to the camera shows a black tattoo of a leafless tree whose trunk curves down the upper arm and whose branches spread over the shoulder. Three small black birds in flight sit across the upper back and shoulder blade. The linework is solid and silhouette-like with no shading, and the tattoo is set against pale skin and a soft, blurred outdoor background.

Shoulder Back Tree Branches Bird

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, love, the kettle's on and the ward won't stir till the two o'clock bells. You'll want to hear about the elm. There was an elm at the bottom of the infirmary garden, beside the goods line, and it had lost every leaf the winter Mr Abbott came in off the nine-fifteen with his chest full of coal dust. He used to say the tree looked like it was reaching for something it had already let go of.

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Every night that winter a pair of rooks came down from the sidings and sat in its top branches, and every morning when the porters unbolted the back gate they lifted off together and crossed the rails. Sister Marr kept count of them like a ledger. One morning three went up instead of two, and she wrote it on the board by the sluice room, under the bed numbers, as if it were a diagnosis.

Abbott died on the Thursday, just before the milk cart came round. The third bird was never seen again, and Marr never explained the board to anyone, though she kept that chalk mark there until the wards were repainted. Folk wanted it to mean something. I reckon it meant only that somebody had been counting when the tree was empty.

So when you're on your own at four with the lights turned low, count what comes off the sill. That's all the work there is.