Black ink sketch of a tattoo design with songbirds, hummingbirds, butterflies and bees among cherry blossom branches, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Birds, butterflies and blossom sketch

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A pencilled line drawing of a tattoo design showing several birds, including a songbird, an owl-like bird and two hummingbirds, alongside butterflies, bees and branches of cherry blossom. The linework is fine and sketchy with light hatching in places, and the design is arranged loosely within an arched outline. The drawing is in black and grey only, with no colour applied.

Botanical Fine line Bird Songbird Hummingbird Owl Butterfly Bee Cherry blossom Branch Flower

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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

The lift was out again, so Rosalind Pike climbed the eleven flights of Harcourt House with a carrier bag in one hand and a rolled sheet of tracing paper under her arm. Teo took the stairs two at a time ahead of her, counting the landings out loud and asking whether the bees would still be there when they got to the top.

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The cherry trees stood in the car park below their kitchen window, four of them, planted the year the block went up. The council wanted them gone to make room for a bin store. Teo had spent the whole half-term at the table with a biro, drawing every bird that came to them: a blue tit hanging upside down from a twig, a little owl on the fence post, two hummingbirds he insisted were real because he had seen one on a programme. Between the birds went blossom, bees and butterflies, all of it squeezed inside a window arch he had drawn with a ruler.

At the residents' meeting the man from the council unrolled a laminated plan across the trestle table. Rosalind unrolled Teo's drawing beside it. Nobody spoke. The radiator ticked. Then Mr Adeyemi from flat forty asked where the blue tit would go if the trees were cut, and the man from the council looked at the paper for a long time.

The trees were still there in May. Teo's drawing hangs by the lift now, held to the noticeboard with drawing pins, and a single pink petal has caught beneath the tape where the owl sits on its branch.