Colour tattoo of a magpie on a leafy branch on a forearm, with greyscale shading of a small animal below, while a person stirs a green bowl in a kitchen.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Magpie and leaves on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A bird with a long tail, drawn in blue-black and olive tones, perches on a branch with green leaves on the upper forearm. Below it, a greyscale design with soft shading and fine detail shows an animal and more leaves, extending down toward the wrist. The shallow focus and warm, slightly faded palette keep the arm sharp while the kitchen background stays soft.

Realism Botanical Forearm Bird Leaves Branch Animal Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Gemma Pryce still blames me for the magpie, though all I did was point. We were fourth years, sat on the wall behind the sports hall sharing a packet of mints, when one dropped onto the netball post as if it had been booked. One for sorrow, Gemma said, counting on her fingers, two for joy. I kept counting after she stopped, because I wanted to know how many more were coming and whether they would ever stop.

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The reunion is in the function room of the Bell, with a buffet of sausage rolls and a DJ who keeps playing songs from our year on purpose. The name badges have school photos printed on them, so everyone is a fringe and a gap-toothed grin under a layer of forty-year-old sensible cardigan. Gemma finds me by the crisps. "You still count things," she says. I tell her I weigh flour in a bakery in Stroud now, and she nods as if that is exactly what she expected, and somehow it doesn't sting.

Later she passes me a biscuit tin with a faded spaniel on the lid. Inside, wrapped in tissue, is a black and blue feather as long as my hand. "I kept it," she says. "I never knew which one it was for." Under the tissue is a note in her round handwriting from the week we left school: Five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret never told.

I walk home along the canal, and on the railing above the lock sit six magpies, bobbing like men waiting for a bus. I stop counting at six. It isn't superstition. I have decided the seventh can be somebody else's job.