Black silhouette design of a branch with two squirrels, red hearts and small birds, drawn as a flash or stencil with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Squirrels and hearts on a branch

Mixed · Flash

A black silhouette design of a leafy branch running diagonally across the frame, with two squirrels facing each other near the right end. Small red hearts float above them, and several small black birds sit among the upper twigs. The design uses solid black shapes with no shading, and the only colour is the red hearts on a plain white background.

Branch Squirrel Heart Bird Leaves Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The timetable board had flickered its last departure at twenty past nine, and the platform was empty except for me and the plane tree at the far end of Platform Four. Nobody noticed the squirrels until Ruth from the buffet came out with a bacon roll and pointed up with it. The branch ran out over the rails as if it had been meant to, dark and ragged against the lamp. One squirrel came along it with her tail held up like a question mark, and the other was already waiting at the fork. For a minute neither moved, as though they had both read the same instruction and were too proud to go first. Three blackbirds sat in the upper twigs, watching with the patience of ticket inspectors.

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Then he dipped his head and she did not run. Something red lifted off the bough and drifted down toward the tracks, a heart no bigger than a fingernail, and I thought of the lost property tray in the office, where for twelve years we had kept a single red glove that nobody came back for. Ruth said the hearts were only hawthorn leaves catching the light. I did not argue with her, because she had her roll and I had a dog-eared timetable and neither of us was going to win.

The last train, the 21:52 to Shrewsbury, slid through without stopping, its carriage lights rolling over the branch like a slow tide. When I looked up again they had gone, two shapes folded into one dark bundle of tail, and I found I was grinning at a tree like a fool. I wrote nothing in the night log except the time and 'all clear', which is the only honest thing a railwayman can put on paper.