Colour tattoo of a leafy branch with two small birds and an orange butterfly across the top of a foot.

Branch with birds and butterfly on a foot

Botanical · Other · Mixed · Photo

A leafy branch with dark black linework runs across the top of the foot, with green leaves along its length. Two small birds, one blue and one purple, perch on the branch, and an orange and black monarch-style butterfly sits to the right. The leaves and insects are filled with colour, while the branch and stems are outlined in solid black ink on light skin.

Botanical Other Branch Leaves Bird Butterfly

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The branch comes aboard on the fourth day out from Lisbon, snagged in the bowsprit netting like a bit of washing. You are the one who fishes it out with the boathook, because you are the youngest on the watch and the youngest always gets the wet jobs. It is still green, and the leaves are speckled with something that might be salt or might be the last of some hedge's dew. Mr Okonedo says it has come a long way from land and you should throw it over. You do not.

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Two birds arrive the next morning, one blue on the back and one a dusky purple, and they settle on the branch as if it were a fence rail they had been promised. Nobody sees where they came from. The cook swears they were hiding in the flour sacks all along. You name them after the two sisters in the village you left, because that is the sort of thing you do when you are homesick and nobody has asked you to stop.

The wind drops for three days and the sails hang like wet laundry. On the fourth afternoon a monarch lands on the rail beside your hand, orange as a banked coal, and it stays while you count to two hundred. Then it lifts and drifts westward, the way the captain says the wind will turn. You understand then that the branch was never the thing that had been lost. You tie it to the mast with a scrap of red thread, and the birds stay on it until you reach harbour.