Black botanical tattoo of two perched birds, a flying swallow and curling vines with leaves on a person's torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Birds and vines tattoo on the torso

Botanical · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The design shows two small birds perched on a vine, a swallow in flight above them, and leafy stems curling outwards from a central stem. The linework is solid black with smooth silhouette-style fills and no shading. The ink sits on a pale, slightly pink area of skin, with a dark fabric edge visible along the bottom of the frame.

Botanical Blackwork Other Bird Swallow Vine Leaves Branch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallow came down over the Hollin hedge the morning after the first frost, and Mags Penrose, who had kept the lane gate since her husband was buried, went out in her apron to see what it wanted. It wanted nothing. It perched on the top rail, turned its blue back to the wind, and waited the way swallows do, as if it had come a long way and expected to be asked in.

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Beyond the gate the forest began, and at its edge stood the hazel the village called the Pair, for two trunks rose from one root. A vine had climbed between them for longer than anyone could say, looping up and out in curls that the children counted for luck. That year two sparrows squabbled over a hollow in it, and the noise grew so loud that Mags's daughter Ellen and the Dunmore girl, Thea, who had not spoken since the boundary fence fell, came up the lane with one spade between them to see what was the matter.

They found the vine split down the middle where a flood had torn at the roots. Neither girl would be the first to cut back the living half, so they knelt in the wet leaf-litter and worked the dead stems free together, one pulling, one digging, until the two halves stood apart and a gap of pale sky showed through. The sparrows went quiet. A bird landed on one side, then another on the other, and each sang across the gap to the other.

Mags watched from the gate. When the girls came back down the lane the swallow was gone, but the top rail was still wet where it had sat, and Ellen said it had flown east towards the water meadows, where swallows always go when a thing has been mended.