Full sleeve tattoo of stylised birds, leaves and geometric motifs with dotwork shading, running from the upper arm down to the forearm.

Sleeve of stylised birds and leaves

Dotwork · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The sleeve shows stylised birds stacked down the arm, with a line-drawn leaf sprig near the shoulder and sunburst-like geometric shapes between the figures. The linework is black and fairly bold, with fine dotwork stippling and patterned fills inside the birds. Teal and green accents sit within the design against a mostly black outline style, and the composition runs in a vertical column along the arm.

Dotwork Botanical Upper arm Forearm Bird Leaf Sprig Sunburst Geometric pattern Dotwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The birds came down the lane the morning after the big frost, one above another like a stack of cups carried by a careless boy. Mrs Adaeze Holloway, who kept the post office at Little Wenning, swore she counted nine of them before she gave up and went back inside to put the kettle on. Nobody believed her about the birds. Everybody believed her about the kettle.

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The trouble started with Harold Pryce's sycamore. He had cut it down in March to put in a conservatory, and the birds had nowhere to roost after that, so they went looking. They tried the church spire, the bus shelter, the wheelie bins behind the Co-op. Wherever they settled, somebody's washing came in damp and smelling of wet feathers. Then one evening they lined up along the stone wall outside the vicarage, heads turned the same way, patterned wings folded tight, as if waiting for a bus of their own.

The vicar, a patient man named Ivan Sorrel, went out with a bag of seed and a list of questions. The birds ignored the seed. They ignored him too, until he mentioned the sycamore. Then one of them, the small one with the sprig of leaves on its back, turned its round face and said plainly that a tree is only a tree, but a sunburst is a promise, and it would be glad to be shown where the sun actually came up.

He spent the rest of that winter with a pencil and a tape measure, marking the field behind the church where the first light hit the wall at dawn. By spring the birds were nesting in the new hedge he planted there, and the leaves came back in little sprigs along the lane. Mrs Holloway still says the birds were the ones who taught the village to get up early.