Colour tattoo of a small bird on a branch inside a black scrolled oval frame, with a teal and orange body, on the upper arm.

Sketchy bird in a scrolled oval frame on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A small bird with a teal and blue back and an orange belly perches on a dark red branch inside an oval frame. The frame is made of bold black scrollwork, and a loose red scribbled shape and small green dots sit within the oval. The linework is sketchy and loose inside the frame, with solid black outlines, and the colour is applied in soft washes against the pale skin.

Neo-trad Upper arm Bird Branch Frame Scroll Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down by the window, Dilys, and keep your voice low, because Ward Seven only sleeps when it thinks nobody is listening. You've been staring at that picture on the wall since midnight, the little bird in its curly frame, and I know what you're waiting for. You want to know why it never sings.

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Forty years ago a bird-seller called Tomasz Peel carried a cage up these stairs under his coat, because his wife had asked him for a bird and he couldn't refuse her anything. The bird was blue at the back and orange at the breast, and it sang at four every morning whatever the porters did. The sisters complained. Matron had it moved to the linen room, then the chapel, and the bird went quiet in every room it was put in. So Tomasz took it home again and sat up with it in the dark, listening to nothing at all.

One February night a boy in Bed Nine stopped breathing for the length of a hymn. The night nurse, Agnes Crowe, had no time to fetch anyone. She threw open the window, and out in the car park a bird began to sing, though Tomasz had died the winter before and the cage had gone to the rag man. The boy coughed. Agnes always swore a thread of red sound hung in the air above the bed, like a line strung between two hooks, and the boy followed it back to the living.

So when the room hums and the frame goes dim, watch the branch. Don't reach for the bell. Close your eyes, love, I'll keep the window cracked, and listen for the little red line.