Black botanical tattoo of three silhouetted birds perched on a thin vine with curls and leaves, on the upper back.

Three birds on a curling vine on the back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

Three solid black silhouetted birds sit side by side on a thin, continuous vine that curls at both ends. Small leaves branch from the stem, and the linework is clean with flat black fill on the birds and fine lines for the stem and tendrils. The design is shown in black ink on skin, centred in the frame with an even, soft light across the upper back.

Botanical Back Bird Vine Leaves Swirl Silhouette

Find an artist for this

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

Tamsin counted the birds before she counted anything else, the way her mother had taught her to check a lock before going to bed. Three on the wire, three on the vine that climbed the hydroponic frame of Deck Nine. Nine hundred and twelve days out from Callow Reach, the number had not changed, and she found herself relieved each time, as though the birds were a loan the ship might one day call in.

Keep reading

The vine had started as a cutting from an old garden module, its roots fed on grey water and the thin red light the engineers called dawnlight. Nobody had planned for it to curl the way it did. Left alone, it wound around the struts in loops that looked to Tamsin like handwriting, a slow script nobody aboard could read. The leaves were sharp-edged and dark. The birds sat on the stem as if they had been there since launch, all three facing the same way, toward the viewport and whatever waited beyond it.

On the morning the count went wrong, there were four.

She stood very still with her torch dimmed to a thread. The new bird was smaller than the others, a silhouette no thicker than a thumb, perched at the very tip of the curl where no stem had been the night before. Tamsin reached for the logbook, then stopped. She wrote nothing. Instead she pinched a leaf from the nearest loop, folded it into her palm, and climbed down to tell the others that the vine had decided to keep something.