Colour botanical tattoo of a mouse perched on a blueberry branch with green leaves, sitting on a woman's upper chest near the shoulder.

Mouse on a blueberry branch across the chest

Botanical · Chest · Colour · Photo

A small brown mouse sits on a branch of leaves and blueberries, facing left, with its whiskers and ears finely detailed. The leaves and berries are shaded in muted greens and blues with soft gradients, and the mouse uses subtle tonal shading for its fur. The design sits across the upper chest and extends toward the shoulder, where other coloured tattoo work is partly visible at the right edge.

Botanical Realism Chest Mouse Leaves Branch Berry

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The branch had been cut too early, and the mouse knew it by the berries, which stayed hard and blue-grey while the barge slid under the lock gate at Stanwick. Her name was Pell. She had climbed aboard the Sunday Rose on a bramble-stem because the bargeman's boy dropped a crust on the towpath, and she had followed the crumbs up the gangplank.

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The bargeman, Amos Tull, did not want a mouse aboard. His wife Hester said a passenger who paid in fruit could stay as long as she liked. So each morning Pell pulled one berry from the branch and set it on the cabin sill for Hester to find. At every lock the rest of the berries ripened a little more, and by the time they reached the wide water past Coldharbour they were the colour of a bruise at dusk.

At Coldharbour the river narrowed under the alders, and Pell saw the hedge where her cousins lived in the roots of an old thorn. She climbed to the rail and stood there with her whiskers out. Hester watched her for a long while, then said the Sunday Rose would be a month getting to the sea and a mouse ought to be home by the frost. Amos carried the branch ashore at dusk and wedged it into the bank with its roots in the wet earth.

The next summer a boatman's child found a blueberry bush growing where no bush had been planted. On its lowest branch sat a small brown mouse, looking back along the cut the way the barges had gone.