Black and grey blackwork tattoo of a magpie with spread wings on the forearm and upper arm, shown on a person wearing a black top.

Two magpies with spread wings on both arms

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two arms carry tattoos of magpies with wings spread wide, one on the upper arm and forearm and one across the forearm and elbow. The feathers are rendered with fine etched linework and soft grey shading, while the white chests of the birds are built up with stippled dots. The composition wraps the birds across the arms against a plain light wall and black clothing.

Blackwork Dotwork Realism Forearm Upper arm Bird Wing Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The magpies had the Bramleys again by the time Nell Harrow got down the ladder, two of them on the top rail of the wall with their tails cocked as though someone had sent them to check her work.

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Her father had kept a gun for them in the scullery, though he never once hit one, and he had taught her the rhyme in the same breath: one for sorrow, two for joy. She had counted them every August since, and every August there were two, never three, never one, the white bibs on each bird gone speckled in the low sun like frost on a windscreen. When she clapped her hands they lifted together and opened their wings wide over the perry pears, black feathers fanning at the tips, and dropped into the lane hedge as if the whole orchard had been theirs to begin with.

The cider house was still shut up. Her brother's letter sat unopened under the tin of nails, asking whether she meant to sell the place or just let it rot with the fruit. She had not answered it. Instead she gathered the bruised windfalls from the grass, wasp-bitten and split, and carried them one at a time to the wall where the birds had been sitting, laying them out along the coping in a row like a gift for someone she could not quite name.

At dusk she sat on the step with a mug of tea gone cold. The magpies came back low over the hedge, two black shapes, and landed among the windfalls without any fuss, picking at the sweetest ones first. One of them looked straight at her with its head on one side. She lifted her mug to it, and the pair of them went on eating side by side, neither willing to leave the other the last apple.