Neo-traditional tattoo of a red songbird with a pale moon, berries and a pearl-edged mirror on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red songbird with moon on forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A red songbird perches on a branch with leaves and orange berries, set against a pale moon. Bold black outlines define the bird, with smooth red and orange fills and grey shading on the wings, leaves and mirror. The composition is diagonal, with the bird at the centre and the pearl-edged mirror sitting at the lower edge.

Neo-trad Forearm Bird Songbird Moon Berry Leaves Branch Pearl Mirror

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Mercy Jane had been tied up at Stoke Hythe for nine days when the red bird began singing at the lock keeper's dog. Nell Garrow had inherited the boat with her father's debts and his cage, and she kept the bird on the back cabin roof among coils of rope and empty flour sacks. It sang at dawn, at the heron, at the church bells across the water. Mostly it sang at its reflection in the brass rail, which Nell found foolish until she caught herself doing the same in the cabin window.

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Ruth Abbott came down the towpath one March evening with a hand mirror wrapped in a tea towel. The rim was set with pearls gone the colour of old teeth, and the glass had a crack like a hair running corner to corner. She wanted it sold, not mended. 'My mother checked her face in it before chapel,' she said, 'and I have never once seen her face in it.' The moon was up over the poplars, pale as a dinner plate, and Nell tilted the mirror so it caught the last of the light.

Nell offered four pounds. Ruth laughed and said the mirror was worth more than the boat. They settled on a trade instead: Nell would fix the bilge pump on Ruth's skiff, and Ruth would cut rowan from the hedge by the weir to make a perch for the bird. Through April the bird sat on the rowan and sang into the glass, and Nell began to hear Ruth's laugh in its trills, which she decided not to mention.

On the last evening before the boat was due to leave, Nell carried the mirror up to the roof and set it face up in the cage. The bird hopped onto the pearls, looked down at its own red chest in the silver, and went quiet for the first time since March. Nell did not sell the mirror. She left the cage door open, went below to wash the flour from her hands, and listened for the wings.