Botanical tattoo across the shoulder and upper arm showing two songbirds among raspberries, wild roses and leaves, in mostly grey shading with peach and yellow accents.

Songbirds and wild roses on an upper arm

Botanical · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

Three photographs show the same arm with a sleeve-style tattoo of a songbird in flight, a yellow-and-black goldfinch, clusters of raspberries, wild rose blooms and seed heads with leafy stems. The linework is dark and defined, with soft grey shading on the birds and foliage. Peach, rust and yellow fills on the flowers, berries and goldfinch contrast with the grey tones, and the design wraps from the shoulder down the outer arm.

Botanical Neo-trad Shoulder Upper arm Bird Songbird Flower Leaf Seed head Foliage Sleeve

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marjorie had been told the hedge plate was to be finished by Lady Day, and the printer in Sherborne wanted it tidy. Raspberry canes, wild roses, the seed heads of old knapweed, all arranged so a buyer could count them. She pinned her paper to the drawing board in the lane every morning for a fortnight, and every morning the goldfinch came down onto the thistle, shook its red face at her, and went.

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The bird would not sit for its portrait. She tried a dead one from the gamekeeper, then a cage bird from the Hallidays' kitchen, but the feathers lost their gold in the lamplight and the wings went flat. What the paper wanted was whatever the hedge did when nobody was watching, and that was never still long enough to copy.

So on the Thursday she stopped drawing the goldfinch and drew the morning her brother had left for Cape Town, the raw dawn when a small brown bird lifted off the wall beside the gate and kept on going over the field. She gave it grey wings pulled tight and a flight line that ran off the edge of the sheet, and she put the roses where the wall had been.

The printer wrote back within the week. Where is the yellow bird, he asked, and where has it gone, because the buyers will want to know. Marjorie read the letter standing in the lane, folded it into her apron pocket, and let him wonder.