Black botanical tattoo on an upper arm showing a blossom branch with a bird in flight, above two bands of lace-like pattern.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blossom branch, bird and lace bands on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a branch of blossom with five-petalled flowers, buds and a small bird in flight above it, with a separate blossom cluster on the upper right. Solid black ink and fine detailing create the flowers and branch, and two parallel bands of lace-like pattern encircle the arm lower down. The photograph is taken from a three-quarter angle, with the subject's face out of frame and a plain white top and light background.

Botanical Geometric Upper arm Blossom Branch Flower Bird Lace Band Cherry blossom

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bird came down on the net-loft roof the morning after the gale, a small dark thing with its wings held out as if it were still falling. Maud Tressider saw it from the slipway, where she was mending the blue line on her father's crab boat. Nobody in Porthgarrow kept birds that did not sing, and this one did not sing. It only looked at the water.

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That week the harbour master's boy found a branch washed up against the lobster pots, bare of leaves but thick with pale blossom, though it was late in the year. Maud carried it home and stood it in a jug on the windowsill. Her mother said plum wood was bad luck on a boat. Maud said it was not on a boat, it was on the sill, and went out again before the argument could grow.

On the first night of the spring tides the bird tapped at the glass. Maud went down to the water with the jug in both hands. The blossom began to drop onto the wet stones in small five-petalled stars, one after another, until the path to the open sea was white. The bird rose and followed it past the breakwater. Her father's boat came home at first light with its nets heavy and every man aboard who had gone out the winter before.

Every February, when the first high tide reaches the net-loft, Maud ties a length of black lace round the neck of that same jug, and the men on the quay swear they can smell plum blossom from the water.