Black and grey fine line tattoo of two birds on a bare branch with a line of script, on the side of the torso.

Two birds on a branch with a quote

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo shows two small birds perched on a bare, twiggy branch that runs across the skin, with a thin branch rising up the left side. A line of small script curves along the upper branch, reading as a quote about living in the moment. The fine, even linework is set against a soft, black and white photograph with the body's contours visible.

Fine line Botanical Ribs Bird Branch Twig Script Quote Tree

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull your chair in closer, the last tram has gone past and the gulls are still quarrelling over the chip shop bins on Duke Street. You want the one about the two sparrows and the bare ash tree? Then listen, because I only tell it once a winter.

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Hettie Marrow kept the clock shop under the railway arches, and every night she wound the same brass clock that had stopped at a quarter past eleven since her husband died. Her neighbour, a sour bookbinder called Mr Okonedo, swore she was mad to keep it. Yet each evening she sat at the window with her tea going cold, watching the ash tree in the yard that had dropped its last leaf in October and never grown another.

One night in February two sparrows landed on the branch, bold as solicitors, and began to argue about a crust. Hettie laughed out loud, the first time in a year, and the sound startled them into flight. They came back. They always came back. By March she had named them Dorothy and Fenn, and she talked to them the way you talk to a stubborn lodger who pays on time.

The turn came when the council sent men with saws. Hettie ran down into the yard in her slippers, waving a clock key like a sword, and Mr Okonedo came hobbling after her. There, under the lamp, she read the words someone had painted on the wall above the bins years back, the ones she had walked past a thousand times: the art of life is to live in the moment. She never wound the brass clock again. She sold it to a man from Leeds, and the tree still stands, with two sparrows on it, if you know where to look.