Black linework tattoo of a songbird perched on a blossom branch, in a botanical style, across the upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bird and blossom on upper arm and shoulder

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A songbird perches on a branch of blossoming flowers, with more blossom trailing down the upper arm. The design is drawn in clean black outlines with light grey shading on the bird's wings and body. The tattoo wraps over the shoulder and upper arm, with the blossom filling the space around the bird.

Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Bird Songbird Blossom Flower Branch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody aboard the Ellen Marrack believed the blackcap would last past the Cape. It had come on at Gravesend in a wicker cage no bigger than a loaf, bought off a bird-seller for a shilling by the cook's mate, and for three weeks it sang at dawn over the galley pipe as though the Atlantic were a hedgerow. Tobias Lunn, the youngest hand, was given the job of carrying its water and its scraps of mealworm, and he was the only one who never once mentioned throwing it overboard.

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Off the Cape the cherry grafts came up from the hold. The captain had bought them from a Bristol nursery for a gentleman in Canton who wanted English blossom in his garden. They were wrapped in damp sacking and lashed to a rope of their own so the spray would not rot the bark. Tobias spent his watches below sitting among them, sometimes with the cage on his knee, talking to the bird about the orchards behind Chew Magna where he had been born, where the trees went white in April so thick you could not see the church tower.

The bird died in the Java Sea, on a morning so flat and still that the mainsail hung like washing. Tobias found it on the cage floor with its feet curled up. He did not tell anyone for an hour. When he did, the carpenter knocked him up a box of pale pine, and the captain, who had little use for sentiment, let him lower it over the side with a sprig of blossom tucked under its wing.

Tobias told it differently in the taverns later, swearing the bird flew off at the Cape and came back to perch on the rigging. Those who had been aboard only smiled and bought him another pint.