Black ink linework drawing of a tree whose branches form the spread wings and tail of a bird, on white paper beside a pen and notebook.

Tree drawn as a spread-winged bird

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A single bird-shaped tree is drawn in black ink on white paper, with its trunk at the base and branches spreading upward and outward to form wings and a feathered tail. The fine, hatched linework gives the foliage tips a delicate texture, while the trunk is shaded more heavily. The composition is centred on the drawing, with a black notebook at the top left and a pen at the lower right.

Botanical Fine line Tree Bird Wing Branches Trunk Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The old pear at the bottom of Haddon's field had stood so long that the hedgerow grew around it rather than through it. By August its branches hung low enough that the children used them as a gate, and nobody in the village had pruned it since my father's time. My job that summer was to sweep the windfalls before the wasps got to them, and I didn't think much of the tree beyond that.

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On the last Sunday of the month a wind came up from the west, the kind that smells of rain that never quite arrives. I was standing under the pear when the branches began to lift. Not all of them, only the ones on the north side, which rose slowly and feathered out the way a heron opens its wings before it commits. The lower limbs bent and split, and the roots came up out of the chalk with a sound like a drawer being pulled open. I didn't run. I think I wanted to see whether it would take me.

It didn't take me. It lifted clear of the soil, and a fall of small leaves came down over my boots like sparks. Its long tail dragged across the stubble and left a line of pale seed behind it. Then it went over the orchard and over the church tower, and the last thing I saw was its shadow crossing the barley, much wider than any bird's.

In October the Haddon pear was back in its old place, bent as if it had been dragged there. Its fruit was sour and the wasps left it alone. I still sweep under it, and every so often, when the west wind comes, I stop and watch the topmost branches for the small movement that means it is thinking about leaving again.