Colourful neo-traditional tattoo of two songbirds, a red birdhouse and pink blossom wrapping around an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Birds and a red birdhouse with blossom on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The design shows two songbirds, one perched on the roof of a red birdhouse at the top and one lower down, set among pink blossom branches and green leaves. The linework is bold and dark, with flat, saturated fills in red, blue, yellow and green and some soft shading on the birds' bodies. The motif fills the upper arm in a tall, vertical composition, with the blossom framing the house on both sides.

Neo-trad Botanical Upper arm Bird Songbird House Blossom Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The house went up on the last Tuesday in March, the week the apple trees along Coldharbour Lane came out pink almost overnight. Tomas Pell nailed the roof on with a mouthful of tacks while his sister called instructions from the gate, and when the last coat of red paint was dry he stood back and admitted it looked like a cottage that had been shrunk for a fair.

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The first to take an interest was a blue tit, who landed on the ridge, inspected the guttering, and flew straight back to the blossom as though she had been asked to make a report. A greenfinch came after her, all yellow flash and temper, and the two of them argued in the branches for most of an afternoon. Tomas watched from the step with his pipe unlit. Nobody had ever argued over anything he built.

By May the house stood empty. The birds preferred the blossom to the rooms, and the greenfinch took to sitting on the chimney like a landlord surveying his rents. Tomas grumbled about good timber going to waste, then one evening found a scrap of blue wool snagged in a hedge sparrow's nest and laughed out loud at the lane.

He never did move them. He only left the red door propped open each night, with a lamp in the window, and by midsummer the blue tit was feeding her young from the porch rail while the greenfinch kept watch from the roof, both of them coming and going as if the place had always been theirs.