Colour tattoo of two blue tits perched on a branch of yellow forsythia, across the shoulder and upper back of a person in a white top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue tits and forsythia on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

Two blue tits sit on a thin branch with yellow forsythia flowers, one bird on the shoulder and one further towards the upper back. The birds are shaded with soft gradients in blue, yellow and grey, and the flowers and green stems are rendered in bright colour. The design wraps diagonally from the shoulder down the upper arm, and the skin tone and freckles around it are visible.

Botanical Realism Shoulder Back Bird Branch Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tilly Ashworth had been counting the nights since the frost broke, because the forsythia on the allotment fence had started to show yellow at the tips and her father always said the blue tits would come before the flowers were fully out. She stood at the kitchen window of the terrace on Harrow Street with the lamp off, watching the yard below, where the streetlight made everything the colour of weak tea.

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The birds came at half past five each morning, before the milk float. Two of them, the cock with his bright cap and the hen who pecked at the bud-cases and tossed them down onto the flags. Tilly had fed them all winter on suet bought from the ironmonger on Castle Street, paying with coins saved from her chippy wages. Her father, who had signalled trains at Holbeck for thirty-one years, had called them the timekeepers.

Then the council men came with a van and a clipboard and said the yard wall would come down in May for flats. Tilly argued, then stopped arguing, and instead took a cutting of the forsythia from the allotment before it was cut back, wrapping the stem in wet newspaper and carrying it home on the bus with her shopping on her knees.

She planted it in a tin bucket by the back step, and on the first warm morning the blue tits found it before she did. The cock perched on the tallest stem, shook the dew off his feathers, and sang the note her father used to whistle at the level crossing. She didn't go out. She let them have the morning.