Colour tattoo of a blue songbird perched on a branch with red blossoms and berries, in a painterly neo-traditional style, on the upper thigh.

Blue bird and red blossom branch on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a blue songbird perched on a thin brown branch, with three red blossoms, a pink bud and green leaves. The bird has soft turquoise shading on its back and wings, with a pale green-grey chest, and the flowers are shaded in deep red with lighter highlights. Loose dark outlines and small splatter-like marks around the branch give the piece a sketchy, painted feel against the skin.

Botanical Neo-trad Thigh Bird Songbird Blossom Flower Branch Berry Leaves Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bird came aboard in a jam jar, wrapped in a wet cloth that smelled of river water, and Mother Oyelaran said it would be dead by the first watch. It wasn't. By the third week it was taking grey mealworms from my palm, and by the fifth it was singing at the hour the lamps were meant to dim, a thin run of notes that made the hydroponic deck sound like somewhere else.

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The branch was the difficulty. Every tree in Greenhouse Four had been bred for fruit, not for the look of things, and the cherry we had kept alive from a single cutting was stubborn about flowering. I grafted and pruned and talked to it the way my grandmother talked to her bread. In the ninth month three blossoms opened together, red as the warning lights along the spine, and the bird landed on the lowest twig as though it had been waiting for a witness.

Ilse from the reactor ring came up to see, grumbling about her shift, and stood with her arms folded until the bird turned its head and looked straight at her. She laughed then, properly, the way nobody laughed down in the dark. 'It knows it's the only one,' she said. 'Shall we tell it?'

I didn't mention that the hull logs showed nothing but ice for four hundred light years, or that the bird would outlive the last cherry if we rationed the water. I opened the hatch to the long corridor and let the cold in. The bird flew to the viewport, hung for a moment against the stars, then came back to its twig as if it had only been checking the weather.