Line drawing of a songbird perched on a blossom branch with dotted stippling on its wing, drawn as a tattoo design on paper with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Songbird and blossom branch design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A songbird sits on a thin branch among open five-petalled blossoms, with leaves and a closed bud beside it. The drawing uses dark, even outlines with dotted stippling along the bird's wing and body and light shading on the feathers. It is shown in greyscale on a pale sheet, with the design filling the frame.

Botanical Bird Songbird Blossom Flower Branch Leaves Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift had been broken since Tuesday, so Maya carried the shopping up fourteen floors with the bag handles biting into her fingers. On the seventh landing the lad from flat nine was sitting on the stairs with a dead phone in his lap, and she stepped over his trainers without asking why he wasn't at school. Her arms were shaking by the time she reached the door, and the bird was already on the balcony rail, puffed up against the cold, as if it had been waiting for her.

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It came every morning now. Brown, quick, with a tail that flicked like it was keeping time. The blossom tree in the car park had been planted the year the estate got its new paint, and it had come out pink and then white and then spilled itself across the bonnets of the cars below. Maya took a council repairs letter from the drawer, turned it over, and drew the bird on the blank side with a biro she'd nicked from the post office. She pressed hard along its flank so the dots made a line where the wing would go, the way her gran used to mark a pattern before she cut.

The letter that came after was from the council too, saying the tree was cracked at the roots and would be felled on Friday. Maya went down in her slippers with the drawing folded in her coat pocket. The men were already there with a saw, and the branch they'd dropped lay on the tarmac with one bud still closed on it. She crouched and tucked the sketch into the fork of the wood, where a bird might land if it wanted to.

On Saturday the rail was empty, and the car park was thick with petals. Maya stood at the window with her tea going cold and watched a small brown shape work its way along the stump, pecking at something she couldn't see, while the wind lifted the corner of a paper stuck under a stone.