Traditional style tattoo of a grey songbird perched on a thorned branch with pink roses and green leaves, on the forearm.

Songbird and roses on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A grey songbird stands on a thorned stem, with a pink rose at its base and another rose on each side, all framed by green leaves. The bold black outlines are filled with flat red and green colour, while the bird's feathers are shaded in soft greys. The design fills a vertical area of the forearm and is centred on the bird.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last songbird in Carrow Hollow sat on the thorned stem of the old hedge rose and would not sing. Mabry Tane had carried water up the ridge to it every morning since the dust came in, pouring it into a cracked enamel dish at the foot of the bush. Each day the grey bird watched her sideways, head tilted, as though she were the one who needed feeding.

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Nobody in the valley agreed on where the roses had come from. Old Ruth said the first ones grew in a glasshouse under the sea wall, back when the sea still reached the wall, and that they had been bred to bloom red through the salt. Mabry thought that was a tale to keep children carrying water. Still, the leaves on her hedge stayed green when everything else had gone to paper, and the thorns drew blood if you reached in too quickly.

On the thirty-first morning the bird shook out its feathers and dropped from the stem. It hopped once around the dish, then settled at the base of the lower rose, where the petals had opened wider than she had ever seen. Mabry knelt in the grit. Beneath the flower, half buried, lay a rusted tin with a handful of dry seed inside, and on its lid someone had scratched a row of tiny leaves.

The bird opened its beak and sang, the first real song in a month, a run of notes that climbed and broke and climbed again. Mabry did not sing back. She only shifted the dish closer to the thorns and let the bird drink first.

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