Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a wooden birdhouse beside a birch tree, with a geometric paper-style bird, inside a circle on the forearm.

Birdhouse on a birch tree in a dotwork circle

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A wooden birdhouse stands against a birch trunk, with a small geometric bird shape to its right and bare branches filling the dark background inside a circular frame. The linework is outlined in solid black, and the wood, bark and background are built up with fine stippled dots and solid fills. The tattoo is shown in black and grey on a plain, evenly lit limb against a dark backdrop.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Bird Tree Branches Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Penrose wanted the box up before the thaw, so I cut the cedar on the Tuesday and planed it on the Wednesday with the window open, because the shavings smelt of the summer my brother left. Four boards, a roof with a proper lip, and one round hole the width of a thumb. I nailed it to the birch at the bottom of her orchard, where the bark had gone silver and was peeling in curls like old wallpaper.

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She came out with a flask and watched me measure the hole twice. Too small for a wren, she said. Right size for what comes in the night. I didn't ask. Her husband had kept bees and she still talked to them, and I had long ago stopped trying to work out which of her remarks were jokes.

The bird came the week after, though nothing had moved into the box. It was a shape of folded paper caught on the wind, sharp at every corner, and it kept settling on the lid and refusing to leave. I found a sheet of her good writing paper folded into it on the back step, the blue ink of her letters to the council running through the creases. Each fold, I came to understand, was a sentence she had never sent to her son in Canada.

I took the box down that evening and cut the hole wider, the way she'd wanted. By morning the paper bird was gone, and a real one sat on the lip, grey and unbothered, looking at me as if I were the one who had lost my way. I left the hole as it was after that. The wind could have the rest of it.