Colour tattoo of a chickadee perched on a branch with pink blossoms, shown on the upper arm in a traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Chickadee on a blossom branch on the upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A small bird with a black cap and grey-brown body sits on a diagonal branch, with its tail feathers extending to the right. Pink blossoms with dark outlines grow along two branches, one on the left and one on the upper right. The bird is shaded with soft greys and a touch of blue, and the branches are shaded in grey, with the design filling the frame against the skin.

Botanical Traditional Upper arm Bird Blossom Branch Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Okafor's cherry branch had been standing in the blue enamel jug on our back step since the second week of March, and by half four, when I lit the ovens, it had put out four pink flowers, which was three more than anyone had promised for a stick cut from the tree on Calder Street. I came out with the bins at ten to five and found the chickadee already on it, black cap tipped down as if it were checking the time.

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It came every morning after that. I started leaving a crust of yesterday's rye on the step, and it would drop down, take three or four crumbs with quick, practical heads, then fly back up to the branch and sit with its tail fanned out over the blossom like a clerk smoothing a ribbon. The flour dust hung gold in the light from the kitchen. The bird never seemed cold, though I was in two jumpers and my fingers were white.

Marcus, my apprentice, wanted it shooed off before it got into the proving baskets. I told him it was earning its keep and that the weevils owed it a debt. He rolled his eyes and went back to shaping the batards. Then one Thursday the step was empty, the jug was empty of bird, and the blossoms had opened fully in the night, every petal showing its dark outline like a careful pen line.

I found it at six, on the sill inside the open door, sitting beside a cooling rack of sourdough. It had come in out of the dawn to look at the loaves. It turned its head and considered them the way I consider the sky on a good morning, as though it had had some part in making them, and I left the crust where it was.