Close-up of a traditional style tattoo of a grey bird with a red breast, with green leaves and berries, on the lower torso above a grey waistband.

Grey bird with red breast and vines on the torso

Traditional · Other · Mixed · Photo

A grey bird with outstretched wings sits on a curling branch of green leaves and berries. The bird is shaded in black and grey with smooth gradients, while its breast and the leaves and berries are filled in with red and green. The design is centred on the skin with the branch sweeping across the lower part of the frame.

Traditional Botanical Other Bird Dove Leaves Berry Vine Branch Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull your stool nearer the fire, for the wind is up over the Harrowgate walls and the stones are in a mood to listen, and I have the last of this tale left to tell before the candle goes. You'll want to hear about the bird, because nobody in those ruins has ever got the bird out of their heads.

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Lord Edric's son Tobias was shut in the solar of the east tower the winter the siege broke, with a bolt on the outside, a pail of water and no news at all. The men who turned the key were not cruel, only tired, and they did not look up when a small grey bird with a red breast began landing on the sill each dawn. It carried a sprig in its beak, bay with a few holly berries still on it, green as the water meadows far below. Harl, the guard who brought the bread, swore it came every morning for a month and never once touched the crumbs left out for it.

Tobias talked to it. He told it about the sea at Corran, which he had seen only once, and the gulls there that stole whole herrings from the fishwives' baskets. The bird tilted its head and listened with its wings half lifted, as if it were about to answer. Then one morning the sprig came with no leaves at all, only a thread of blue ribbon knotted round the stem, and when Tobias untied it he found a scrap of paper folded small enough to hide under a fingernail. It said the postern gate would be left unbarred at the new moon, and it was signed by Maud the washerwoman, who had watched that bird fly the road between the village and the tower for a year.

The bird flew him out that night, or so the tale goes, though the guards swear it was only a bird and Tobias walked out of the postern like any man with a bundle on his back. Some folk say the red at its breast is the mark of blood spilled at that gate, and some say it was never anything but a robin that had got into the lord's kitchens. Me, I think it was simply carrying what it was given, one green thing at a time, until somebody on the far side of the wall needed it.