Black and grey fine line tattoo of a bird's nest with branches and feathers, and a moth inside a solid black circle, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bird's nest and moth on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm shows a black and grey tattoo of a bird's nest with twiggy branches, feathers and a small seed pod, drawn in fine linework with light shading. Below it, a moth is rendered in pale negative space inside a solid black circle. Part of another tattoo is visible higher up the arm, and the arm is set against a silvery green plant background.

Fine line Botanical Blackwork Forearm Moth Branches Feather Seed pod Circle Bird Plant

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit still, Tom, and stop picking at that scab, or the wren will think you're a hedge. You want to know why Mrs Pargeter wouldn't let the hedge be cut that spring? I'll tell you, though you'll not believe the half of it.

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She had a nest in the blackthorn at the bottom of her garden, a great cup of moss and horsehair with a feather pushed through the rim like a quill in a secretary's desk. Every April the hedge-cutter came up the lane with his machine, and every April she stood in front of it with her apron full of seed heads and said the nest was spoken for. He thought she was soft. Maybe she was. But the nest was empty most years, and that spring it wasn't, and she'd sit on an upturned bucket with her knitting and not knit a stitch, listening.

The moth came the second week of May. It came to the lamp on her back step, big as a child's hand, pale as the underside of a birch leaf, with two eyes painted on its wings. She said it was the same moth that had come every year since her husband went into the sea, and I told her moths don't live that long, and she laughed at me and said that was exactly why it was the same one.

The nest got its eggs and then its chicks, and the cutter never came back. Last I heard, the lane's blackthorn is still standing, bare as a bone in winter, and the moth still circles the lamp each May, pale against the dark. Mind your hands now, lad. Fetch the shears.