Pencil sketch of a bird with spread wings beside rosebuds and leaves, drawn as a tattoo design on paper.

Bird in flight with roses sketch

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

A bird with outstretched wings is shown in mid-flight, with its head turned to the right and its feet tucked beneath it. Two rosebuds and several leaves sit behind and beside the bird, with loose leaves below its tail. The linework is soft and sketchy, with shading in brown and red pencil and touches of blue along the feathers.

Botanical Bird Wing Rose Rosebud Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sparrow came to the sill of the lock-keeper's cottage the week the canal froze at its edges, when nobody in the valley expected anything to fly. Ada, who was nine and had been told to stop feeding things that would only die of it, put out crumbs anyway, and the bird took one and looked at her sideways with its head cocked as if it were deciding something.

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The next morning she found a rosebud on the sill, plucked from the hedge behind the lock, though the hips were long gone and the wood had turned grey. She had set it down herself, half to be rid of it. The sparrow took that too. Every morning after, Ada left a bud, and every morning the bird lifted it in its beak, spread its wings wide against the white sky, and flew low over the water toward the far bank, where nothing had grown since the old mill burned.

Her father said it was a daft bird and she should let it be. Her mother said nothing, but she stopped scolding about the crumbs. In February the ice went out in a single night, loud as a gunshot, and the sparrow did not come for three days. Ada walked the towpath to the far bank with a cup of crumbs and a pocketful of buds and stood there until her toes ached.

In April a briar stood on the far bank where the mill had been, pale green and tangled, and on the top of it a rosebud was opening. The sparrow sat on the bud, shaking the canal water from its wings, and looked back across to the lock as if it had always meant to be there.