Black botanical tattoo of three birds perched on a twig and a flock of birds flying up towards the shoulder, placed on the upper chest and collarbone.

Birds on a branch across the collarbone

Botanical · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A branch with leaves and twigs runs diagonally across the upper chest, with three bird silhouettes perched on it toward the right. Three more birds fly upwards over the shoulder towards the top left of the frame. The linework is bold and the birds are solid black fill with grey shading, on a pale skin tone with a black top visible below.

Botanical Chest Shoulder Bird Branch Twig Leaves Flying bird Silhouette

Find an artist for this

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

You reached the top of Cold Gap before the mist did, which Hannah said was the only race you had ever won against her. The old thorn leaned out over the drystone wall, bent sideways by sixty winters of wind coming up from the dale, and its bare branches were crowded with finches arguing about the weather. Your boots were soaked through. Hers were not. She sat on the wall with a paper bag of oatcakes and didn't offer you one, which meant she was still angry.

Keep reading

"Three of us, then," she said, watching the road drop away below them into cloud. "Mam keeps the farm, Tom keeps the tractor, and you keep running off." She tossed a crumb toward the finches. They ignored it, as finches do, and three of them settled on the lowest twig, close as pegs on a washing line, and went on chirping about nothing. You thought of the letter in your coat with the Glasgow postmark, and the room in Partick that was waiting for you.

The next flock came out of the mist without warning, a dozen small dark shapes that wheeled over the wall in a long unravelling line. Hannah watched them climb over the ridge and didn't follow them with her eyes, which was how you knew she had already decided something. "Go on, then," she said. "They're not waiting for you to finish your sentence."

You climbed down the far side with the wind at your back and the letter damp in your fist. When you looked up from the bottom of the gap, three birds still sat on the thorn, and three more had lifted off and were climbing the air above the wall, heading the way you had come, and you could not tell from that distance which of them was her.