Fine line tree of life tattoo on the ankle with swirling black branches, small blue, red and green birds perched in the boughs and two black birds flying to the right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree of life with birds on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A black linework tree with swirling branches and roots forms a heart shape at its base. Small birds in blue, red and green sit in the branches, with green leaves and curls, and two black birds fly off to the right. The design is centred on the ankle and calf area, set against a plain pale background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ash at the top of Carrow Lane had been dying for three summers before Mags Tolley came up the hill with the bow saw. She found the Pritchard boy sitting in its lowest fork with his boots dangling, counting birds on the branches.

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"Four," he said, not looking down. "Blue, red, green, and that little one with the stripe. Two went off over the church roof this morning and they haven't come back."

"Those'll be the flyers," Mags said, and she leaned the saw against the wall. "Some always go."

She knelt at the base to see where the roots had heaved the wall stones, and her trowel struck something under the leaf-mould. The stones beneath were laid in the shape of a heart, a little lopsided, as if someone had built it by feel in the dark. Her gran had once shown her a heart like that pressed into the mortar of the old well house, and said the first woman to lay it had been waiting on a husband off the coal boats. He never came home, but she kept the heart anyway, because a heart is a thing you keep.

Mags carried the saw back down the lane and sat in the roots with her flask of tea. Above her the boy began his count again from the beginning, and after a while a blue bird dropped out of the sky and settled in the fork beside him.

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