Colour realism tattoo of a magpie perched on a branch with purple blossoms, on the lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Magpie on blossom branch on a calf

Realism · Calf · Colour · Photo

A magpie with a dark teal-black head and back, white belly and a blue-black tail sits on a bare branch. Purple blossoms with green centres grow along the branch, with a few loose petals falling beside the bird. The bird is shaded smoothly with soft highlights, and the flowers are rendered in bright purple and green on a pale skin background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The magpie came to our orchard the week my father stopped speaking to the Hallam brothers over the boundary wall. It sat on the cherry branch nearest the lane and chattered the blossom out loud, or that was how it sounded to me, a low run of clicks that went one, two, three, and then stopped, as if it had lost its place.

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My grandmother said that was the trouble with magpies. They kept accounts. Everything taken from a village ended up in their branches, the thimble off the sill, the wedding ring Mrs Pell dropped into the mill race, and they counted it all against whoever had been careless. She tied a red thread round the trunk and told me to keep out of the bird's way until the blossom fell.

I did not keep out of its way. I climbed the wall at dusk with a jam jar of milk and set it on the stone, and the bird came down bold as a bailiff and drank. Next morning there was a silver teaspoon on our step, and beside it a single pink petal, pressed flat as a flower in a book.

My father found the spoon and laughed for the first time in a month. He walked to the Hallams' gate with it in his hand, and I followed. The magpie watched us from the cherry tree, and I swear it nodded, the way old men do when a debt has been settled and nobody has to say so.

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