Colour tattoo of a red cardinal perched on a branch with pink dogwood flowers and green leaves, on the outer thigh.

Cardinal and dogwood on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A red cardinal sits on a brown branch with pink dogwood blossoms and green leaves growing around it. The bird has soft shading in red, orange and black, with thin dark outlines around the flowers and branch. The warm reds and pinks are set against pale green foliage, and the design wraps diagonally down the leg.

Botanical Thigh Bird Flower Branch Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The band at the Grange hall stops for a breath between numbers, and somebody's cousin shouts for the fiddler to keep going. You stand by the open doors with a paper cup of lemonade going warm in your hand, because Walter Pruett has asked you to dance twice already and you have promised him nothing. Outside, the dogwoods along the county road are dropping their pale pink petals onto the gravel, and the air smells of cut grass and diesel.

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Walter comes across the boards in his good brown shoes, red in the face from the heat, carrying a second cup he has not asked whether you want. He says his brother saw a cardinal land on the fence post at dawn, and that it means something, though his brother has never been sure what. You tell him birds mean whatever the person looking needs them to. He laughs, a short bark, and holds out his hand for the waltz without waiting for your answer.

You dance. The fiddle climbs into the rafters where the swallows nest, and the floor sways under your feet like a boat tied to a dock. Over his shoulder you watch the door, where a flash of red crosses the yard, bright as a struck match, and settles on the lowest branch of the tree by the car park. Walter sees you looking and turns, and for a while the two of you watch the bird together, neither of you speaking.

When the set ends, you walk out into the dusk with him, and the cardinal is still there, shaking dew from its crest. 'Well,' Walter says, 'I suppose that's decided.' You do not ask him what. You hand him your lemonade, take his cup instead, and go back inside with the petals stuck to your shoes.