Black and grey tattoo of bare birch trees with two small birds perched on the branches, shown on the side of the torso.

Birch trees and birds in black and grey

Botanical · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo depicts a cluster of leafless birch trees with pale bark marked by dark horizontal patches, with two small birds perched on thin upper branches. The trunks and branches are drawn with fine dark outlines and soft grey shading that fades toward the top of the frame. The design is entirely black and grey and is shown against lightly lit skin in a close, slightly angled photograph.

Botanical Realism Other Tree Bird Branch Bark Winter Forest

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hal had been clearing the north edge of Crowmere since the frost set in, and the birch would not give him an easy cut. The trunks were pale as candle wax, barred with dark patches where old limbs had dropped away, and they grew so close that the saw kept catching on the one behind. By the fourth afternoon his hands had stopped feeling the handle, so he only noticed the siskins when one of them dropped a twig onto his sleeve.

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There were two of them, perched on the thin upper branches of the tallest tree like stitches holding the grey sky to the wood. His mother had planted that grove the winter he was born, one tree for each child she meant to have. She got as far as seven before the fever took the baby and the winter took the rest of her. Hal had never managed to count the trunks without losing his place. He counted them now, leaning on the saw: seven pale stems, with blue shadows pooling at their feet where the snow had melted back.

He did not finish the cut. He pulled the blade free, sat on the stump of the one he had already felled, and watched the siskins hop from twig to twig. When the light went he walked home along the fence with the saw over his shoulder, and the birds followed him branch by branch, as far as the gate, as if someone had asked them to see him in.