Realistic colour tattoo of a red cardinal perched on a branch among white dogwood flowers, with script lettering below.

Cardinal and dogwood tattoo

Realism · Colour · Photo

A red cardinal with a black face and orange-yellow beak sits on a branch with white and pink dogwood blossoms. The bird is shaded with smooth gradients and the flowers have soft petal detail, set against a loose purple and blue wash. Below the design, black script lettering reads Dad with a flourish beneath it.

Realism Botanical Lettering Bird Flower Branch Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Fourteenth day of the thaw, Sallowmere. The dogwood along the east wall has come out all at once, white and pink, as if someone had hung lanterns in the bare branches overnight, and Master Corvin says it is a sign the river will rise. I have stopped believing signs since the summer the king's ledgers went missing, but I notice I have been standing under that tree for the better part of an hour.

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The cardinal arrived at dusk. Red as a dropped coal, with a black mask pulled tight over its face like a clerk who has been up all night, and it did not fly off when I came near. It hopped along the branch, stopped beside a cluster of blossom, and sang the same three notes over and over, the way my mother used to call the hens in from the lane. The queen's gardener swears it is the bird that sat on her husband's grave in the years before he died, though the gardener also swears the moon once fell into the well.

I wrote to the harbourmaster that evening, asking him to send word to the far coast. I did not say why. The reply came by the next tide, two lines in a crabbed hand: Keep the window open. Tell the bird it is welcome.

So the window is open. The cardinal has gone, but a fresh petal is caught on my sill, pale at the tips and pink at the heart, and I have pressed it between the pages of this book so that whatever news is coming will find me holding something that is still in bloom.