Two solid black silhouette tattoo designs on white: a thistle with spiky leaves at the top and a bird perched on a leafy branch below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Thistle and bird with leafy branch designs

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows two separate black silhouette designs on a plain white background. The upper design is a thistle with a spiky, ornate flower head and broad, serrated leaves on a stem. The lower design is a bird in flight beside a branch with oval leaves, with simple cut-out details in the wings and body.

Blackwork Botanical Thistle Bird Leaves Branch Flower Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the kingdom of Vell, where the hills were too stony for wheat, the old king had a standing order that every thistle on the royal walls be cut before midsummer. His gardener, a widow called Ansa Corrow, cut them every year, and every year they came back, purple-crowned and bristling, thicker along the battlements than before.

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That spring the rains failed and the river Yarrow dropped to a trickle. The bird came in May, a dark swift with a sprig of olive-green leaves clamped in its beak, and it dropped the sprig onto the king's table during the feast. Nobody knew where it had flown from. The counsellors said it was an omen of ruin. Ansa said nothing, but she had seen the bird circle the thistles on the wall before it came down.

The king sent for her when the leaves began to wilt in the sun. "Cut the walls," he said. "Cut every one." Ansa climbed up with her shears and found the old thistle at the corner tower, its roots sunk into a crack where water still ran beneath the stone. She could not cut it without first pressing the damp soil between her fingers, so she told the king where to dig. They found the spring by evening, cold and sweet.

The bird came back at dusk and settled on the thistle's head, folding its wings around the spikes as if they were nothing at all. When Ansa climbed up the next morning the flower had gone to seed, and a single grey feather lay in its crown, held there by a drop of dew. The king kept the shears hanging on the wall, and no gardener of Vell cut a thistle again.