Two cartoon lovebirds perched on a branch, one green and one mauve, tattooed across the inner wrists with small red hearts and dotted lines above.

Two cartoon lovebirds on inner wrists

Other · Colour · Photo

Two large-eyed cartoon birds sit side by side on a thin branch, one green with a yellow-orange beak and one mauve with a small pink flower on its head. Small red hearts float between them and fine dotted lines hang above each bird, with bold dark outlines and soft shading on the bodies. The tattoo is shown across the inner wrists, with the two birds spread over both arms in a balanced composition.

Other Bird Heart Branch Flower Dotted line Cartoon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The aviary keeper at Pompeii swore the green one was the cleverer of the pair, but I have kept birds for thirty winters and never found one clever about anything but seed. They came to me in a wicker crate on a mule from the Alexandrian docks, two small parrots the traders called lovebirds, sold cheap because no one wanted them apart. The green one I called Nikias, for his sharp yellow beak that always looked ready to argue. The mauve one wore a scrap of pink blossom tucked above her eye like a lady at the baths, so she became Thaïs, after the flute girl who lived above the baker's.

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They would not eat unless they shared a perch. I strung a thread of blue glass beads from the pergola so the morning light would catch them, and every afternoon they sat side by side on the bough of the pomegranate tree, feet gripping one twig as if sewn to it. When the red blossoms fell, Thaïs picked them up in her beak and dropped them between their feet, and Nikias pretended not to notice, which is how I knew he noticed everything. The boy who swept the courtyard called those petals hearts. I told him the birds had no notion of such things.

In autumn the merchant Dexios bought Thaïs for his daughter, and the crate left through the Herculaneum gate before dawn. Nikias sat on the bough all that day and would not sing. The next morning, though, I found him on the garden wall of the merchant's house, and across the lane a fig tree held a thread of blue beads swinging between two branches. Nobody had hung it there but Thaïs, who had worked the knot loose with her beak and carried one end over the wall. I never told Dexios. I let the thread hang.