Watercolour-style forearm tattoo of a songbird on a branch, with red berries, sketched mushrooms and an hourglass, in fine line and splashes of colour.

Bird, berries and mushrooms on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A songbird perches on a thin branch at the top of the forearm, with an hourglass, two sketched mushrooms and a sprig of linework below it. Red dots and soft watercolour washes in green, purple and pink sit over the fine black outlines. The design runs diagonally up the forearm against a plain skin background.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Bird Branch Berry Mushroom Hourglass Watercolour Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sand in the kitchen glass had run down to a thread when the thrush landed on the sill, and Mabel Crouch did not turn it. Turning it would mean admitting the morning had gone, and the morning was all she had left to spend on the wood. Her husband had gone out after the blewits at first light and not come back, and the rain had been steady since.

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She took her basket and went up the beech path with the bird hopping ahead of her from branch to branch, as though it had been sent to fetch her. Red berries hung over the stile like beads from a broken string. Under the roots of the fallen oak she found him sitting with his back to a stump, two pale mushrooms in his lap, saying the light down here had no sides to it and he had lost track of the hours.

She did not scold him. She knelt, set the basket down, and turned the glass in her head the way she had turned it on the sill, once, slowly, so the sand ran back up into the bulb. Then she took one of the mushrooms from his lap and tucked it under her arm, and the wood seemed to lift its hand from them both.

They walked home together with the rain easing off. At the gate she heard the baker's boy whistling down the lane, late as ever, and she let him be late. Above the kitchen door the glass was still full, the sand lying heavy in the bulb, and the thrush had gone quiet on the sill as if it had finished its errand.