Black ink drawing of a small fairywren with a raised tail and white wing patch, perched on a thin branch with green leaves.

Fairywren perched on a leafy branch

Mixed · Flash

A small black bird with a white wing patch and a long, upright tail stands side on, perched on a thin outlined branch. The body is filled with soft black shading, while the legs, branch and feathers are drawn with fine dark lines. A small cluster of green leaves sits at the lower right against a plain cream background.

Bird Branch Leaves Wing Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ice on the trough at Lower Hatch had to be broken with the heel of a boot every morning in January, and Ada Pyle did it while the dog watched from the gate with its breath hanging in front of it. The letter from her brother Frank was folded four times in her coat pocket. It had come from Western Australia in pencil on thin blue paper, and a sprig of something grey-green had been pressed inside it until it crumbled to dust when she opened it.

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Frank wrote about a bird that followed him along the boundary fence every dawn. It was no bigger than a wren, he said, and the male wore black like a funeral coat, with his tail held straight up as if he were asking a question nobody had answered. The children at the station called them fairywrens. Frank called it the little parson, because it never stopped talking and never once sat still long enough to be blamed for anything.

She took the billhook down to the bottom hedge where the hazel had been laid that week, and she stopped at the stile because there was a bird on the cut bramble. It was small and black, with a white patch on its wing and a long tail standing upright behind it like a shut fan. It did not fly. It looked at her with one bright eye, and the green leaves at the end of the bramble shook a little where it had landed.

Ada knew it could not be the same bird. Nothing that size crossed the world on a sprig in an envelope. But she stood very still until the little parson decided she was furniture and went back to its business in the hedge. Then she walked up to the house, took the stub of pencil from the tin on the windowsill, and began, Dear Frank, the hedge is still standing.