Black and grey realism style tattoo of a songbird perched among jasmine flowers and leaves on the outer thigh or upper leg.

Songbird and jasmine on an upper leg

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A small songbird with a dark cap and black throat sits on a branch, with its tail sweeping up to the top right. Clusters of five-petalled star-shaped flowers and broad, veined leaves surround the bird, with fine outlines and soft grey shading on the feathers and petals. The design is in black and grey ink and fills most of the frame against smooth, lightly lit skin.

Botanical Realism Upper arm Bird Songbird Flower Leaves Branch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have been told the big top goes to the auction house in Doncaster on Monday. The lions went last spring and the horses before them, so what remains is you, eleven people who still know how to rig a trapeze, and a blackcap called Mab in a wicker cage hung from the ticket wagon. She is the only act that has never once missed a show.

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Pell bought her from a pet shop in Halifax the winter the takings first dropped, and she learned four notes and the trick of lifting a brass token from the tin with her beak. Nobody paid to see her, but Pell always said a circus needs one thing that doesn't need anything from the crowd. The jasmine is yours. You rooted a cutting in a jam jar the year the trucks stopped running, and now it has climbed the wagon's canvas roof and set its white star flowers, which smell strongest after dark.

On Monday morning a man with a clipboard walks the lot, counting poles and sniffing at the cages as if they were a used car. You carry Mab's cage to the wagon steps, slide back the little door and wait. She sits on the rim and considers the whole grey field, the way she considers anyone who owes her money. Then she goes, not up into the sky as you'd expect, but low and quick into the jasmine.

That evening you sit on the steps with a flask of tea and the lamps switched off. Somewhere in the leaves there is a rustle, then four clear notes, the same four Pell taught her. You listen until the clipboard man's lorry has gone down the lane without its load, and you realise the bird was never the one who needed to be kept.