Colour tattoo of two magpies perched on a white flower with green leaves and red berries, in a bold neo-traditional style on the upper chest.

Two magpies and flower on upper chest

Neo-trad · Chest · Colour · Photo

Two stylised magpies, one perched on a branch and one in flight, sit over a large white flower with green leaves and small red berries. Thick black outlines divide the forms into angular, stained-glass-like panels, filled with marbled blue and grey shading. Blue, green and red ink stand out against the pale skin, and the design is centred on the upper chest.

Neo-trad Botanical Chest Bird Flower Leaves Berry

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada had counted the magpies twice before the band struck up, once from the cloakroom window and once from the bench outside the Palais, where the lamps made the wet pavement look like shallow water. Two of them. One for sorrow, two for joy, her mother would have said, but her mother had never once been asked to dance at the Rex on a Saturday.

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Inside, the floor was already full. Her cousin Frank had told her the Glaziers' Ball was a cheap affair, lemonade and a raffle, but the windows along the far wall were the real thing: panels of coloured glass the Sheaf Street works had leaded together for the hall's opening in 1931. Blue and grey swirled through them like pulled taffy, and where the leads crossed, a white bloom sat stiff as a paper cut. Someone said the birds were magpies, that the old works foreman had insisted on them, because a magpie will steal anything shiny and still come back to the same tree.

Frank found her by the lemonade urn with a sheet of paper folded small in his fist. "Dance with me first," he said, "then you can look at what I drew." She danced. Halfway through a quickstep the light through the glass shifted, so the bird in flight seemed to settle on the branch and the one on the branch seemed ready to lift away. By the last waltz she had stopped counting them.

When the band packed up, he walked her home under the lamps. At the corner she unfolded the paper. It was the window, drawn in pencil, two birds and a white flower, and tucked into the leaves were two sets of initials, hers and his, with a small red berry drawn beside each one.