Traditional style tattoo of a red cardinal perched beside a red and yellow star flower on the inner forearm, with a partial rose at the top left.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cardinal and flower on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A red cardinal with a black head and a yellow beak sits on a branch, with small yellow flowers and green leaves around it. Below the bird is a round red and yellow star-shaped flower set inside a blue and black ring. Bold black outlines and flat, saturated colour fill the design, which is photographed against a dark leather surface.

Traditional Botanical Forearm Bird Flower Rose Leaves Branch Rosette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Night sister Ruth Pennock had worked the seventh floor of St Brannock's for nineteen winters, and in all that time she had never once let a bird inside. Her mother had told her that a redbird at the window was a message from somewhere close, and that you answered it by keeping a lamp lit and saying the name of whoever it was meant for. Ruth thought this was nonsense. She still kept the lamp lit.

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On the night the cardinal came, Bed Nine held a farmer called Alec Dunmore, who had been asking for his brother since supper. The bird landed on the sill just after two, a plump red thing with a black face, and it looked in at the ward as though it were checking the beds. Ruth went to draw the curtain. The bird did not fly. It tapped the glass three times, then waited, the way a man waits at a door he already knows is open.

She said, "Walter," because that was the brother's name on the chart. The bird turned its head and gave one clear whistle. Down the ward, Alec opened his eyes and said, "There he is," and went quiet in the easy way Ruth had learned to tell apart from the other kind. She sat with him until the window greyed. The bird was gone by then, but three small yellow petals lay stuck to the sill, the same yellow as the flowers that grew along the lane where the two brothers had been boys.

Ruth left the lamp burning until the day staff came on. When the day sister asked why the ward was so bright at seven in the morning, Ruth said she had been waiting for someone to come and collect a message, and that it had been collected.