Black ink flash drawing of a bird in flight carrying a sprig, with a landscape inside its body and flowers around it, in a botanical neo-traditional style.

Bird in flight with flowers and lettering

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing of a bird in flight with outstretched wings, carrying a sprig of leaves in its beak. A small landscape of houses and trees sits within the body, with a rose-like bloom and a mandala-style flower above and a larger flower to the left. The phrase "in the place just right" is written in script beneath the bird on a cream, rounded card.

Botanical Neo-trad Bird Flower Sprig Landscape House Tree Lettering Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tell me, then, why the bird would not settle. Every hedge in the valley was offered to her, and she turned them all down with a flick of the tail, the way your aunt refuses a second helping of pudding. She had a sprig of hawthorn in her beak, still green, and she would not drop it until she found the place it belonged.

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She flew over Halden Mill, where the wheel had stopped the spring the river rose. She flew over the chapel roof, its slates gone to moss, and the bell nobody had rung since the vicar's knee gave out. Then she came down the long slope to Ashby Cross, where the chimneys were smoking and a boy was hauling water up from the well in two buckets that clanked like bad teeth. She perched on the gatepost of the last cottage and waited, and nobody shooed her off, which was how she knew.

The old carpenter who lived there came out with his pipe. He looked at the sprig, then at her, and said a place was not a place at all until somebody agreed to stay in it. So the bird wove the hawthorn into the thatch above the door, and the carpenter, grumbling, pushed more straw in around it to keep the rain out. By morning there were three eggs in a hollow beneath the eaves.

Ask anyone in Ashby Cross where the place just right is and they will point at that door, though they will also tell you the thatch leaks and the carpenter is a miserable old goat. That is how you know it was the right place. Nobody who loves a house admits it easily, and nobody who has found one ever quite leaves.