Black flash sheet of a bird, floral sprigs, scroll ornaments, a lace border and a flower, drawn as tattoo designs in a stencil-like style.

Floral and bird flash sheet in black

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A sheet of black line-art designs on a white background, including a small songbird, a branch of five-petalled flowers with berries, a curling scrollwork sprig and a single flower. A lace-like border runs down the right edge, and a dense field of scrolls, leaves and small flowers fills the lower left. The shapes are solid black silhouettes with no shading, arranged loosely across the page.

Botanical Bird Flower Floral Scroll Leaves Berry Lace Border

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull your chair nearer the stove, love, you're letting the draught in. Now, you've twenty minutes till the next one and nothing to read but that faded timetable, so you'll have this instead. It's about Winifred Coyle and the bird on the lamp bracket at Thornbury Halt.

Keep reading

Winifred made lace the way other women breathe, without thinking about it. When the stationmaster's wife was asked to dress the waiting room for the Coronation, she stitched a border so fine the porters wouldn't walk under it. Scrolls along the edges, five-petalled flowers, berries no bigger than peppercorns. Every morning a small brown songbird sat on that bracket outside and sang at the milk train until somebody shouted at it to hush.

Then the line was closed. The last train ran through on a wet Friday in March, and the men took the lamps and the bell and the enamel sign, and nobody thought about the bird until they found the bracket bare. Winifred had come back for her lace, the whole length of it folded in a biscuit tin, and she stood on the empty platform with the wind pulling at her coat.

The bird was still there, a bit thinner than before. She said, "Well, you can't stop here on your own," and tucked the loose end of the border into its nest. Next morning the platform was empty and the lace was gone, and the stationmaster swore blind he saw a little brown flash heading north along the old track, trailing a white thread behind it like a bride's veil.