Neo-traditional tattoo on an upper arm of a small bird with clockwork gears in its body, surrounded by red poppies and green leaves.

Clockwork bird with red poppies on an upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A songbird in profile is built from black and grey shading, with its wing feathers drawn in fine hatched linework and its body stippled with dots. Exposed brass-toned gears sit in its body, and the bird is set against large red poppies with dark centres and green leaves. The design fills the frame diagonally, with the bird in the lower half and the flowers wrapping around it.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift had been broken since March, so Dad carried Grandad's clock up eleven floors of Hollins House in a pillowcase, stopping on every landing to swear at the stairwell. The bird inside was no bigger than a fist. Grandad had built it the year before he stopped going out, with brass wheels salvaged from a dead bank clock and a wren's head carved from boxwood, though the head had cracked and he'd glued it back with fish glue and a good deal of language.

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The poppies were his too. Every spring he sowed them in a window box on the balcony, shaking the seed out of an old tin of spare cogs, and every summer they came up red against the grey flats opposite, so bright the pigeons landed on them and then thought better of it. The council letter arrived in April. Hollins House was coming down in the autumn, and everyone had to be out by August. Dad said we would take the poppies. Grandad was already in the hospice by then, so the bird was mine to decide about.

I wound it on the kitchen table that night, the key stiff in my fist. The little wren lifted its head, the gears inside turning over one another like someone counting under their breath, and it sang the four notes Grandad had taught it, thin and exact, out through the open balcony door. Across the road a light came on in a flat I had never once looked at.

In the morning the window box was full of petals, dropped in the night. I picked one up and pressed it into the tin with the spare cogs, so the next lot of seed would have something to go on.

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