Black and grey dotwork and fine line tattoo on the inner forearm of a small figure holding strings to a flock of birds, above a dotted planet and stars.

Small figure floating with birds above a planet

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small seated figure drifts upwards on a bundle of thin lines tied to a cluster of birds in flight. Below, a dotted, shaded planet with a tiny sprout sits beside scattered stars and a small ringed planet. The work is built from fine single-needle linework and stippled dotwork shading in black ink, with the birds and stars arranged in an open, airy composition across the forearm.

Fine line Dotwork Forearm Figure Bird Planet Star Balloon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sprout had come up overnight, no taller than a thumbnail, and Oskar would not let the goats within a stone's throw of it. Their planet was not much bigger than the village square. You could walk its whole circumference before the bread finished rising, and every evening he sat on the rim with his knees under his chin and counted the stars that had come out to watch.

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His grandmother had told him the birds were the souls of people who had gone up the far side of the sky and found it too wide to come down again. She tied them to him with lengths of cotton thread from her loom, one for every winter she had lost, and when the wind came off the marsh they tugged him gently up, the way a child pulls a grown-up towards the fair. Oskar did not believe the story, but he did not believe it was false either, and that seemed to be how she liked it.

On the night the sprout first split its seed, he untied the thread from the smallest bird and held it out over the edge. The bird hung there, uncertain, then turned its head and flew back to the others. Oskar understood then that nothing up there was lost, only waiting for someone to take hold of it.

He climbed down before dawn and planted the rest of the seed beside the well, and by the time the goats woke, the sprout was already reaching for the first star.