Fine line black tree tattoo with a small bird in flight on the inner wrist, shown in a black and white photograph.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small tree and bird on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tree with thin branches and clusters of leaves sits on the inner wrist, with a tiny bird flying off to the right. The linework is fine and solid with no shading, and the ink is black against pale skin. The tattoo is centred on the wrist with plenty of empty skin around it, and the photo is in black and white.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Tree Bird Leaves Branches

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Pennick would fell the old hawthorn at the top of the lane, not even after lightning took half its crown the summer the river came over the bridge. Tom Ostler, who laid hedges for the parish and trusted nothing that did not grow back, said it was only sulking. Every morning he walked up with his billhook and a flask of stewed tea, and he talked to the tree the way a man talks to a horse that has thrown him once and might again.

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By March the bare limbs had gone grey as old rope, and the only sign of life was a small bird that sat on the eastern branch and watched the lane. Tom could not have named it. Plain brown, he said, with a dark little flick to its wing, the kind you only notice when it is leaving. It was always leaving. Each time he looked up it had lifted off and gone a little way to the right, over the stone wall towards the chapel, then come back to the same twig as if it had forgotten something.

He began keeping count on the back of a seed packet. Forty-one visits, forty-one departures. On the forty-second morning there was a green bud on the very limb the bird favoured, and by Whitsun that side alone was in leaf, thick and dark, every branch leaning the same way. Tom stood under it with his tea going cold and understood that the tree had not been sulking at all. It had been waiting for something to carry its seed away.

His daughter Jennet, home from the mill, found him sitting in the lane with the packet on his knee. She laughed and said he ought to write it up for the parish. He turned the packet over so she could read the tally, forty-two with a line drawn under it, and beneath that, in careful pencil, one more word: stay.