Black and grey botanical tattoo of a bird's nest with an egg, twigs and a feather on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bird's nest with eggs on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A bird's nest woven from twigs and grasses sits at the centre of the design, with a pale egg visible inside and a feather rising from the right side. Above it, a bird's wing or feather spray is drawn in dense hatching, with sprigs of foliage and seed heads spreading across the arm. The work uses fine, densely hatched black linework with light grey shading and no colour, set against a dark sleeve and a blurred green background.

Botanical Upper arm Feather Wing Twig Leaves Seed head

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The third nest of the morning was empty, and Ada made her grandson climb for it anyway. Tom grumbled from the ladder, his boots slipping on the wet rungs of the stile, but he reached into the hawthorn at Moor Lane and drew out a cup of couch grass, horsehair and dry willow stalks. One pale egg sat in the hollow, cold as a pebble. Ada had her notebook open on the gate, the pencil stub tucked behind her ear. She wrote the date, the hedge, and the word one.

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Her husband had sold eggs once, for a shilling a clutch, to a dealer from Yeovil who kept them under glass lids in a case that smelled of camphor. Ada had found the receipt in his coat the winter after he died. Since then she had walked every hedge between the church and the brook, counting, and taking nothing. Tom asked whether the egg would hatch if they left it, and she told him it had been a week since the hen had sat, so no, but that was not the point of counting.

Above the field a buzzard turned on the wind, its wings spread wide and barred like a fan of old ink. Tom watched it come down over the oak and go out of sight behind the barn. He climbed back down with his hands scratched and his face pleased with itself. Ada took the pencil from behind her ear and wrote the number again, then a line under it.

As they turned for home a feather lifted from the nest Tom had left on the hawthorn, a single grey plume the length of a finger. It caught the breeze, turned once above the ditch and settled in the nettles. Ada looked at it for a long moment. Then she wrote, one feather, not counted, and closed the book.