Black and grey tree tattoo with birds rising towards the neck and a line of handwritten script across the upper back.

Bare tree, flying birds and script on upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is seen from behind, showing a black and grey tattoo of a leafless tree spreading across her upper back. A flock of small birds rises from the branches up towards her neck, and a handwritten line of script sits beside the trunk at the lower right. The shading is soft and the linework is fine, with a plain indoor background.

Botanical Back Tree Bird Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Forty days out from Falmouth, the finches came down onto the mainyard as if it were a branch they had been waiting for. Nobody aboard had seen small birds so far from land. Old Hollis, who had worked the Cape run for thirty years, swore they were dying and would be overboard by supper. They were not. They stayed, picking at the tar and the frayed sailcloth, and the cook started leaving crumbs on the hatch cover without being asked.

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I kept a little book of weather and knots, and on the twelfth night I wrote that the birds had begun to leave at first light and return at dusk, always to the same spar. My mother had a bare sycamore in the yard at Penryn, grey through every winter, and she used to say a tree that had dropped its leaves was not finished, only waiting to be asked again by the wind. I thought about that while I watched them settle, one by one, like buttons being sewn back on a coat.

Off the Horn the sea turned the colour of slate and the wind came round hard. The mainyard split at the mast with a crack like a musket, and I was sent aloft with a lashing and a bosun's knife. Halfway up, the whole flock lifted from the broken wood at once and went out over the water in a loose, brown spray. My hands were bleeding from the rope by the time I reached the stay, and I held on to it longer than I needed to, watching them shrink into the grey.

We made Valparaíso in April with a jury rig and a new spar cut from a stranger's pine. Before the anchor went down, I saw them on the new yard, five of them, huddled against the wind as though the wood had always been theirs. I left a handful of biscuit on the hatch cover that night and did not call them down. Some things come back to a tree only when nobody is asking them to.