Black and grey fine line tattoo of two birds perched on a thin branch with small leaves, on a person's upper back near the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two birds on a branch on the upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two small birds sitting close together on a slender branch that sweeps diagonally across the skin, with a few leaves and buds along its length. The linework is delicate and the birds are filled with soft grey shading to suggest form and feather texture. The design is in black and grey ink, and the subject is framed off-centre against the shoulder blade with a plain background.

Fine line Botanical Back Bird Branch Leaves Bud

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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

The porter found the bird in the stairwell at ten past two, a small grey thing sitting on the rail as though it had been posted there. He carried it up to Ward Six cupped in both hands, because nobody else on nights would have touched it, and because Sister Ruth had said that morning that the blackbirds were nesting in the hawthorn by the car park and someone ought to keep an eye on them.

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Bed four held a man called Walter Duff who did not sleep. He had been a hedger before his legs went, and he said a bird that sat close to another bird was frightened, or else it was keeping watch. He asked for the window to be opened a crack. The porter opened it, and the bird went out into the dark, and then it came back, and then there were two of them on the sill, shoulder to shoulder, looking in at the beds as if they were counting.

Walter said that in his village they called that a sitting, two birds on one bough, and that you did not disturb a sitting until it was done. So the porter left the window as it was and went about his rounds with his torch turned low. The corridor clocks ticked. Somewhere a trolley wheel squeaked and stopped.

At six the sky went the colour of weak tea. Walter was asleep for the first time that week, his mouth open and his hands loose on the blanket. The porter went to shut the window and found one bird still there, and when he lifted his hand it did not fly. He stood a while and then closed the window very gently around it, and on the sill, where the bird had been, lay a single grey feather that he left where it was.