Black linework tattoo of a songbird perched on a blossom branch with bleeding heart flowers, running from the shoulder down the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bird and blossom on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A small songbird sits on a branch of cherry-style blossom at the top of the upper arm, with bleeding heart flowers hanging from a stem below it. The design is drawn in fine black outlines, with light shading on the bird's wing and body. The tattoo fills the arm from the shoulder down, and the skin appears healed and clean against a plain dark background.

Fine line Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Bird Songbird Blossom Flower Branch Leaves

Find an artist for this

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

The bird would not leave the cherry tree on Hollin Lane, though the blossom came down in one wet week of April and the old men said a sensible songbird would have gone south with the rest of the spring. It sat on the topmost bough from first light and sang down at the hedge where the bleeding hearts grew, and nobody in Thornbury could make it stop.

Keep reading

Mrs Pim kept those hearts in a border under her wall. Every stem bore a row of little pink lanterns, and when the wind got up they knocked together and let fall a drop of colour onto the path. Her husband had carried in the first root from a cottage in Wales, and he told her the flower was called a broken heart, which she thought a poor name for something so fine. Each evening the bird came down the branch to the nearest stem and sang until the light went grey.

In June the vicar's boy came with a catapult, and a clerk from the council came with a notebook, saying the bird was a nuisance and the lane ought to be tidied. Mrs Pim went out in her apron and stood under the cherry tree with her hands in her pockets. She did not raise her voice. She only said the hearts had never bled on anyone who minded their own business, and the clerk went back down the hill without opening his notebook.

That autumn she dug up half the border and set the roots along the path where the drops fell, so the lane ran pink for a month the following spring. The bird stayed on its bough through the frost and sang over the new stems at dusk. Some evenings you can still hear it from the bottom of the hill, and the hearts still hang there, each one holding a single bead of rain it never quite lets go.