Traditional style tattoo of a grey bird with an orange breast perched on a branch with red chrysanthemum flowers, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bird on flowering branch on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A grey songbird with an orange breast and a red-tinged eye sits on a dark branch, with red and yellow chrysanthemum-like flowers and green leaves around it. The bird is shaded with smooth grey tones and bold black outlines, and the flowers have solid red and orange fills with yellow centres. The design wraps vertically along the forearm, with flowers at the top and bottom framing the bird in the centre.

Traditional Forearm Bird Songbird Branch Flower Chrysanthemum Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Aldous planted the chrysanthemums in the spring she buried her husband, three pots tipped into the mortar gaps of the old gatehouse, and nobody at the trust ever had the heart to pull them out. I kept the grounds at Hollin Keep for thirty-one years, and every June the flowers came up red and yellow through the broken lintel as if the castle had chosen them itself.

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The surveyors came in the autumn with their clipboards and their talk of consolidation. The gatehouse was to be propped, pointed and roped off by the New Year, and the honeysuckle, the thistle and Mrs Aldous's stubborn chrysanthemums were to go into a skip behind the tea room. I said nothing. I had seen the grey bird in the blackthorn by the postern gate for six springs running, the little songbird with the rust-coloured front, and I had heard her scold the workmen from the top of the arrow slit.

On the last morning before the scaffolding, I climbed the wall with a trowel and a bucket and found the nest tucked into the cup of the stems, three pale eggs no bigger than my thumbnail. I sat on the cold stone a long while. Then I put the trowel back in my coat and told the foreman the flowers were diseased, which was a lie, and that I would see to them myself, which was true.

The scaffold went up around the gatehouse that winter, and in April the grey bird was still there, perched on her dark branch above the new pointing, scolding the men in hard hats who walked beneath her as though they were the visitors.