Colour neo-traditional tattoo of two stylised birds facing each other with leafy branches and a pink dotted circle, across the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two facing birds and branches across a back

Neo-trad · Back · Colour · Photo

Two stylised birds face each other across the upper back, with angular geometric patterning in green, red, teal and black. Below them, thin dark branches with leaves cross at the centre, and a pink dotted circle sits above. The bold outlines and solid colour fills are clean, with some soft shading on the birds' bodies.

Neo-trad Geometric Back Bird Branch Leaf Dot Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Hannah Pell ran the galley of the collier Marrow for thirty years, and in all that time she never threw out a bone without first asking the birds on the rail whether they wanted it. Two of them came every evening in the dog watch, green-winged and sharp-crested, and they sat facing each other on the rope as if they had argued about something before she arrived.

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One February the ship lay off a grey coast with the stove gone cold and the biscuits gone damp. The bosun, a man called Tobias Renn, said the birds were bad luck and should be shot. Hannah told him to mind the bread instead. That night the birds did not come. In the morning a branch of blackthorn lay across the galley step, leaves still on it, cut clean, and beside it sat a single pink-speckled stone the size of a plum, warm as if someone had been holding it.

She carried the branch to the stove, and the wood caught like paper, bright and quick, and the galley warmed enough to bake a loaf that rose higher than any in living memory. Renn ate two slices and said nothing more about birds. The next evening there were two of them on the rope again, and between them, feet crossed, lay a second branch with tiny leaves.

They never explained themselves, and Hannah never asked. When the Marrow was broken up at Hull, she kept the stone in her apron pocket until she died, and the birds, so the cook's boy later swore, followed the cart to the gate and sat facing each other on the wall until it was out of sight.