Black silhouette design of four birds perched on a branch, with the word LOVE picked out in white letters across their bodies, in a blackwork style.

Four birds on a branch spelling LOVE

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

The design shows four solid black bird silhouettes perched in a row on a bare branch with twigs extending to the left and right. The word LOVE is cut out in white serif capitals, one letter across each of the middle birds and the outer birds' bodies. The image is a flat two-tone graphic with no shading or gradients, centred on a plain white background.

Blackwork Bird Branch Love Silhouette Lettering Twig

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had come in off the estuary before the stalls were up, and by noon Ada Penrose had sold no eels and two dozen cockles to the same tired man. Above her awning, on the dead ash branch the council kept meaning to saw down, four starlings sat in a row with their wings folded close, as if they had been told to wait.

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Her grandmother had a saying for it. When birds settle in a line over a market, somebody out past the bar is coming home, and they will not leave until they have been fed and spoken to. Ada had no bread, only the cockle shells, so she threw those, and the birds did not stir. Old Mr Hosking from the next pitch watched her from under his tarpaulin and said that the birds wanted the word, not the food. Her brother Tom had gone out on the Mary Ellen eleven winters back, and nobody had said his name at that market since the funeral.

So she said it, quietly, to the wet branch. The first starling lifted, then the second, then the third, and the last one stayed a long moment, turning its head to look at her with one bright eye before it dropped off the twig and went west over the slate roofs towards the harbour.

She shut the stall and walked down to the quay with the rain in her collar. The Mary Ellen was coming through the bar with her lamp already lit, low in the water and slow. A man stood at the rail lifting one hand, and above the mast four small dark shapes came down onto the rigging and settled there, as if they had never once been away.