Small colour tattoo of a plump robin with an orange breast on a person's upper chest, beside a black bra strap.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Robin on the upper chest

Chest · Colour · Photo

A cropped photograph of a person's upper chest showing a small tattoo of a stylised robin standing side-on with its head turned to the right. The bird has a flat ochre body, an orange-red breast and simple black outlines on the beak, eye and thin legs. The image has a Polaroid-style border, and the chin and lips are visible at the top of the frame with a black bra strap running down the left side.

Chest Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, pull your chairs in, because the robin on the fourteenth floor isn't going to tell this himself. Mrs Okonedo's balcony at Kestrel House had a cracked terracotta pot that the council never got round to mending, and in the spring of the big wet year a robin decided it was his. Nobody on that estate thought much of birds. Pigeons, yes, and gulls that stole your chips off the bins. But this one was a plump little ochre fellow with a rusty waistcoat, and every morning he sat on the railing and sang at the lift shaft as if it were a cathedral.

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Teodor from flat 22 was the only one who stopped to listen. He drove a delivery van, never sat still, and yet each morning he'd pause on the walkway with his keys in his fist and wait until the bird had finished. Then he'd shake his head and say, "Same old speech, mate," and go down fourteen floors, two steps at a time. In May the robin's mate laid five eggs, and by June the pot was full of open beaks and a racket that carried right down the stairwell. People started leaving crumbs on the rail without admitting it.

Then a man with a clipboard came round and tapped the pot with his pen. The balconies were coming down for the works on Monday, he said, and anything left out would go in the skip. Teodor said nothing. He waited until the man had gone, then climbed up with a shoebox and a tea towel, and carried the whole nest down inside his jacket, fourteen flights, one careful step at a time. He set it on the bench by the bins, where the sun came in sideways and the cars didn't.

The robin followed him down, of course. He always did. He landed on the bench, cocked his head to the right, and considered the boy with the shoebox for a long time before he went back to feeding his young. If you go up Kestrel House today, mind the lift, and look over the railings. There's always a robin somewhere, pretending the view was his idea.