Black silhouette of a tree with curling, swirling branches and three birds perched among them, shown as a design drawing rather than on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swirling tree silhouette with birds

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A solid black silhouette of a tree with a thick trunk and wide, spreading branches that end in curled, scroll-like swirls. Three small birds sit on the branches, with one at the base of the trunk. The design is flat black with no shading or greys, set against a plain white background.

Botanical Tree Branches Swirl Bird Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third week out of Valparaíso the cook has stopped shooing the finches off the galley hatch, and you have stopped pretending to mind. They come aboard at dawn, smaller than sparrows, and walk the deck as though they paid their passage. You keep a board of mahogany under your bench, salvaged from a chart table at Falmouth, and in the dog watches you cut into it with a gouge the Bosun lent you and never asked back.

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The tree comes slowly. First the trunk, thick as a man's thigh, rooted at the bottom edge where the grain runs true. Then the branches reach up and out, and at each tip you curl the wood over itself the way a violin scroll turns, because your grandmother's clock had a painted tree like that and you never forgot how the tendrils ended. Three birds you set on the limbs. One you set at the root, where the Bosun says sparrows feed when a ship lies becalmed.

Off the Azores the wind backs and the glass falls like a stone down a well. The board goes over in the forward store and splits straight through the upper boughs. You kneel in the wet with the two halves and cannot make them meet. The Bosun says leave it, son, the sea doesn't want your furniture. So you plane the broken ends smooth, and the tree comes back shorter, fewer curls, a crooked trunk, but still a tree.

Liverpool smells of coal smoke and wet rope. You nail the board above your bunk in a lodging house off Scotland Road, and that night, for the first time since the Horn, the room is quiet enough to hear the river. You look up. One bird on the lowest branch has turned its head toward the window, as if something out there is about to land.