Black ink sketch of a ribcage with a flower, a pelvis, an insect wing and a spine decorated with a bird, blossom and mushrooms, drawn as a tattoo design.

Ribcage, pelvis and spine with flora and fauna

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

Two pen drawings on a spiral sketchbook page show a ribcage with a marigold-like flower and leaves, a pelvis, and an insect with a wing. A second vertical spine design features a perched bird, blossom branches, ivy and bracket fungi. The linework is fine and built up with cross-hatching and stippling, with shading inside the bones and leaves, and the composition is arranged in two separate panels.

Botanical Ribcage Spine Flower Leaves Insect Wing Bird Blossom Mushroom Branch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the bracket fungus on the third step, Dilys says, it's spread since Tuesday and it'll have your boot through if you're not careful. We had the old oak down in March, the big one by the chapel wall, and nobody thought to lift the trunk off the moss. By June it had a tenant on every joint of it, like a lodging house with the doors painted over.

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I was the one who found the ewe in the ditch that winter, and Dilys was the one who boiled her clean on the back step with a pan we never used for anything else again. The ribs went on the wall above the bench, the pelvis went to the school because the children asked for it. She kept one wing of the cranefly we found pinned to the sill and swore it was the best thing that came out of that whole bad year. I told her a thing with wings that size shouldn't be allowed in a kitchen, and she said that was exactly why she kept it.

The nuthatch came in April. It walked head first down the trunk the way they do, as if the bark owed it money, and it wedged its nest into a split where the ivy had got a grip. The sloe came up through the same split a fortnight later, white blossom on a branch no thicker than a pencil, and the bees found it before the bird had finished lining its home.

I asked Dilys in August whether she'd sell the wood for firewood before it went soft. She looked at the nuthatch going in and out, and at the mushrooms stacked like plates along the bark, and said the fire could wait. She left the gate open after that, so the tenants could come and go as they pleased.