Neo-traditional tattoo of a colourful songbird on a black branch, surrounded by pink blossoms with green leaves, on a person's leg.

Songbird and pink blossom on a leg

Neo-trad · Calf · Colour · Photo

A bright songbird perches on a dark branch, with its head turned to the left and its wing and tail feathers rendered in green, teal and yellow. Pink five-petalled blossoms with yellow centres and green leaves frame the bird on several sides. Bold black outlines, smooth colour fills and small stippled details define the design, which fills most of the frame.

Neo-trad Botanical Calf Bird Songbird Blossom Flower Branch Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Edmund had been told twice by the prior that the bird was a distraction, yet every morning he carried his ink and psalter out to the cloister garden, where the songbird waited on the dark bough of the old plum. It had arrived in February through the broken pane of the scriptorium, its feathers dusted with frost, and it had refused every crumb but the one Edmund offered on his thumb. Now the blossom was opening along the wall, five pink petals to each flower, and the bird ruffled its teal breast and sang as if the whole garden owed it a debt.

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The abbey's accounts were due at Michaelmas, and the lay steward, a man called Harrow who smelled of tallow and horses, had come to say the roof would not wait for prayers. Edmund listened with his eyes on the bird. "It sings when I read aloud," he said, which was true and did not help. Harrow looked at the psalter, then at the bird, then at the blossom, and sighed the sigh of a man who had never once been sung to.

That evening the prior found Edmund still in the garden, the lamp guttering on the wall. The bird had gone quiet on its branch. Edmund said nothing. The prior, who had been a sailor before he took the habit, did not ask either. He sat down on the cold stone beside him, and they waited together, and at last the bird lifted its head and sang, and the blossom did not fall.