Vintage-style botanical tattoos on a shoulder and upper arm, showing a nest with blue eggs, a pink rose and a sparrow on a blossom branch.

Sparrow, nest and rose on upper arm

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

Three vintage-style illustrations sit on the shoulder and upper arm: a nest with three pale blue eggs and pink flowers, a pink rose with leaves and a bud, and a sparrow perched on a branch of pink blossom with chestnut-style leaves. The artwork has soft, detailed shading with muted greens, browns and pinks, and the designs are spaced apart across the skin. The woman's face is not shown, and the photograph is set against a plain pale background with a white lace top.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Rose Bird Blossom Leaves Flower Branch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the sparrow wedged under the tarpaulin of your father's dinghy on the third morning of the gale, soaked and furious, its beak open like a hinge. Your brother wants to leave it for the gulls. You do not. Mrs Abney at the chandlery has a shoebox of old seed catalogues and a jar of brass pins, and she tells you that a bird that small can live a long time if somebody decides it will.

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For a week you carry it in your coat pocket. You learn it prefers bread soaked in warm milk to anything sensible, and that it sings only when the foghorn on the breakwater falls silent. The harbourmaster's wife lines a crate with hay and says nothing when you bring it into her kitchen. On the Sunday, the wild rose behind the bakery on Fore Street drops its first petals across the cobbles, so you carry the crate up the hill to the hawthorn above the wall.

You lift the lid. The sparrow sits on the rim for a long moment, watching the blossom shake in the wind, then drops into the branches as though it had always meant to. Below you the boats knock together at the slip. Your brother shouts that the tide has turned and you should come down before the water takes the steps.

On the way down you notice a nest tucked in the hedge, lined with moss, with three pale blue eggs. You crouch and look for a long while. You don't touch them. You leave the empty crate on the wall with its lid open, for whoever comes next.