Black ink tattoo of a bare tree with small red accents and a flock of birds flying across the upper back, in a botanical silhouette style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bare tree and birds on upper back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A photograph of a tattoo on a person's upper back, showing a leafless tree rising from a dark patch of ground on the right, with a flock of birds flying up and to the left toward the shoulder. The tree and birds are drawn in solid black ink with bold silhouette-like shapes and fine branch detail. A few small red dots appear among the upper branches, and the plain, slightly warm background keeps the focus on the skin.

Botanical Back Tree Bare tree Bird Flock Branches Silhouette Berry

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The big top came down in Shrewsbury on a Tuesday, and by Thursday all that was left of the Ambrose Brothers' Travelling Circus was a heap of tent poles and Mr Ambrose's ledger. I was the one who counted the seats each night. Sixty-one on the last Friday. I wrote the number in pencil, because ink felt like an insult.

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The field behind the showground had one tree, an old rowan with its leaves already gone. Birds came to it at dusk, starlings mostly, and they lifted all together whenever a van door slammed, black smudges climbing over the hedge. Ambrose said they were the only audience that never asked for their money back. The rowan berries hung on the topmost twigs like the last sequins off a costume nobody had the heart to mend.

Mira, who had flown on the trapeze for eleven seasons, sat under that tree with a flask and told me to stop counting. We had sold the horses to a farm near Ludlow. The elephant had gone too, though nobody would say to whom. I asked her whether she'd miss it. She said she'd miss the moment before the drop, when the whole tent went quiet and every bird in the county seemed to hold its breath.

On the last morning the birds rose off the rowan, wheeled once over the caravans and headed west. Mira tossed her flask into the back of the lorry and said, "Well, they know where the next crowd is." I wrote sixty-one in the ledger, crossed it out, and then wrote nothing at all.