Blue and grey tattoo of a bird nest with a single egg, surrounded by wild rose flowers and leaves, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bird nest and wild roses on an arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a bird nest with a single pale egg at its centre, with two open wild rose blooms and trailing leaves above and beside it. The linework is fine and detailed, with soft grey shading in the nest and lighter wash on the petals. The ink is mainly blue with grey tones, set against pale skin on a curved arm that fills most of the frame.

Botanical Realism Upper arm Flower Leaves Branch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Oswin had the hedge marked with a red cord by the time I came out with the shears, and he did not look up when I stopped beside him. The wild roses along the east wall had grown over the cloister footing the way they had grown over everything since the flood year, pink in June and heavy with hips by Michaelmas. Prior Hugh wanted the wall pointed and the stones seen. He wanted the hedge gone to the root.

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I went up the ladder anyway to measure the cut, and found the nest in the crook where three canes met. It was built of grass and moss and something finer, perhaps horsehair from the donkey paddock, and it held one egg, pale as the lichen on the stone. Nobody had sat on it for days. I stood on the rung with the shears open in my hand and thought of the ledgers I kept in the scriptorium: the number of boards, the number of nails, the hours of light left in each day.

I left the three canes standing and cut the rest. Oswin saw it at vespers and said nothing, which from Oswin is a sermon. Hugh came to the garth the next morning with his hands behind his back and looked up at the nest for a long time. He asked whether the egg was still warm. I said I had not touched it, which was true, and he said it was the first sensible thing he had heard all week.

The wall went up in the autumn with the cloister left open to the sky. In spring the roses came back through the gap where I had cut, and in the crook of the old canes a small grey bird sat with its head down, not yet singing. I brought Oswin the first bloom from it. He pressed it inside his psalter without a word, and I have never asked him which page.