Black and grey realism tattoo of two gerbera daisies with a faint bird behind them, on the shoulder and upper arm.

Two gerbera daisies and a bird on a shoulder

Realism · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

Two large gerbera daisies are tattooed one above the other across the shoulder, with the upper bloom partly overlapping the lower. A soft, smoky silhouette of a bird sits to the right of the flowers. The petals are shaded with smooth grey gradients and fine outlines, and the flower centres are rendered in deep black against the lighter skin.

Realism Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Daisy Flower Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth had the tiller under one arm and the kettle in her other hand when the first gerbera came loose from the cabin roof and rolled off into the cut. It bobbed there, a flat pink-grey disc on the brown water, while the lock keeper at Stoke Hythe shouted something about the Mary Ellen's paintwork and the bad weather coming up from Gloucester.

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She had bought the pots in Worcester from a man who sold cut flowers off a trestle at the basin, the sort of blooms nobody bought for a funeral. Her father had called them daisies with ambition. They lasted longer than sense said they should, and when the barge tied up for the night they stood in a row along the gunwale like guests who had not been told the party was over.

The bird arrived on the third day below the locks, a swift or a swallow, she could never settle which. It came low over the towpath, dark and quick, and then it was gone into the willows so fast she only saw the smudge where it had been. Her brother swore it was a swift and that swifts never landed, which he said was the whole point of them.

By the time they reached Tewkesbury the gerberas had gone brown at the edges and she had stopped watering them. She cut the dead heads off with the galley knife and dropped them over the side, one after another, watching each one turn slowly on the current toward the Severn. The last flower she kept. She pressed it between two pages of the logbook, and when she opened the book again in winter, the bird was still there in the margin, drawn in pencil by someone who had been watching the water too.