Pencil sketch of a songbird perched on a swirling branch with curled tendrils, a tattoo design drawn in a spiral notebook.

Songbird on a swirling branch sketch

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil outline of a small songbird with a closed eye, perched on a central stem. Curling vines and tendril scrolls extend from the stem on both sides, with faint ghost lines of other shapes in the background. The linework is single-weight and unshaded, the paper is pale cream, and the composition is centred and vertical.

Botanical Bird Songbird Branch Vine Swirl Tendril

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lamp is nearly out and the tale is longer than the oil. My grandmother's garden backed onto the canal at Ashby Lock, and on its one crooked apple tree there lived a songbird with its eyes always half shut, as if it were listening to something nobody else could hear. The children called it Sleepy Tom. The old gardener, Mr Pell, called it nothing at all, because he said you do not name a thing you intend to keep only for a season.

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One November the vine that climbed the wall went wild. It threw out tendrils overnight, curling round the gate hinge, round the water butt, round the handle of Mr Pell's spade, until he could not get the spade out of the shed. He cursed it in three languages and then sat down on the upturned bucket and wept, which surprised everyone, least of all himself. His wife had planted that vine the spring she died. Nobody had thought to tell the vine.

The songbird flew down and perched on the spade handle and sang one long, low note. The tendrils loosened, one curl at a time, the way a fist opens when it has forgotten what it was holding. Mr Pell wiped his face with his sleeve and said it was the cruellest and kindest thing he had ever seen a bird do. Then he went and fetched the shears, and he left one tendril curled round the bird's own perch, just so it would have something to hold onto while it sang.