Coloured pencil drawing of a skull formed from bare branches, with a blue bird perched on top, blue blossom, a green apple and no body placement shown.

Skull of branches with a bird and blossom

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

A skull outline is built from grey, twiggy branches, with a small blue and yellow songbird perched on the crown. Blue blossom, green buds and a yellow-green apple sit around the lower jaw and cheeks. The fine shading is soft and detailed, set against a plain white background with the design centred on the page.

Botanical Skull Bird Branches Blossom Flower Apple Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The orchard at Hollin Fold had gone quiet the winter old Mabel Teague stopped pruning it, and by March the apple trees had grown into one another like hands clasped in prayer. Her grandson Tom came up from the village with a saw and a bad temper, meaning to clear the lot. He found the bird first, a little blue tit sitting on the bare crook of the oldest bough, its crest raised as if it had been waiting for him.

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"Shoo," said Tom. The bird did not shoo. It turned its head one way and then the other, the way a clerk looks over a ledger, and went on watching him.

He worked until dusk, lopping the dead wood and stacking it by the wall, and every time he looked up the bird was still there, and so was a single yellow-green apple that had not been there that morning, hanging low at the edge of the cut stack. He picked it, bit it, and found it sour enough to make his eyes water. Then he remembered the story Mabel used to tell at Christmas, about the orchard keeper who would not let Death take the last apple, and how Death, having no use for fruit, had asked for a fair bargain instead: the keeper must keep the living branches growing as long as there was a bird to sing in them.

Tom put the saw down. In the morning he found blossom out on every cut end, pale blue, as if the wood had never been told it was finished. The tit was still on the crown of the oldest tree, and it sang once, very briefly, before it flew off towards the church.