Black linework tree with sparse branches and leaves, its trunk flowing down into a bird with spread wings, tattooed on the inner forearm in a botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree and bird on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A bare tree with fine black branches and small scattered leaves sits near the top of the forearm. Its trunk and wispy lines flow down the arm into a bird with outstretched wings, shaded in muted brown and grey tones. The composition is set against a dark background with soft directional light on the skin.

Botanical Fine line Forearm Tree Branches Leaves Bird Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ovens had been lit an hour when Hal Thorne noticed the bare tree climbing the cellar wall. Its branches spread up through the grate and fanned across the whitewash, fine as pulled thread, and on the thinnest twig hung a single leaf the colour of toast.

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His daughter Nell came down with the lamp and held it close. "It wasn't there yesterday," she said, and then, because she was eleven and practical, "Where's the bird gone?"

There had been a bird. Hal had seen it that morning, a grey-brown thing with its wings lifted, rising out of the flour dust by the trough like smoke off a damp wick. It had looked at him the way the old miller used to look at a loaf that had risen too fast, and then it had folded itself back into the dough.

Grandmother Ada had a rule for such things. You fed what came out of your oven, and you did not ask it for anything. So at first light Hal wrapped the first tin loaf in a cloth and walked it to the gate of the workhouse, where a thin man waited with his hat in his hands. When the loaf was handed over, the bird came up out of the cellar, rose past the chimneys and took the last leaf from the tree with it.

By the time the bells rang seven the branches were bare again, and the cellar smelled only of yeast and cold stone. Nell found one feather-shaped crumb on the sill, still warm, and she did not eat it.