Two fine line robin tattoos with red breasts on a lower abdomen, one beside the small word hmm.

Two robins on a lower abdomen

Fine line · Other · Mixed · Photo

Two robins are drawn in black outline with red breast patches, one perched on a thin line at the left and one on a line at the right. A small lowercase word, hmm, sits beside the left bird. The image is a close, straight-on photograph of a bare midriff above jeans, with the tattoos shown in good detail.

Fine line Other Bird Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pargeter had been feeding the robins on her back wall for eleven years, and in all that time she had never once heard one of them agree to anything. Her husband Dennis said it was the wire. Two birds on a single line, he said, would always be arguing about who got the end nearest the feeder. She said it was simply the nature of robins, which were small and red-breasted and had opinions about everything.

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The matter that spring was the apple tree. The younger robin, a bird with a chipped beak and no manners, wanted to build in the crook of the old Bramley. The elder wanted the ivy by the shed, where the cat could not reach. They put their cases to Mrs Pargeter in the only way they knew, by sitting on the line at either end of the lawn and staring at each other across the washing. Every morning she came out with her tea and found them there, neither leaving first.

On the ninth morning she heard the elder say something short and cross, and the younger answered with a single word that sounded like a shrug. Hmm. Then nothing. After that the two of them sat very still for almost an hour, long enough for her tea to go cold, and when they finally flew off it was together, low over the fence, towards the ivy.

Dennis asked her that evening who had won. She told him nobody had, which was the first sensible thing either bird had done all year. That's the trouble with a pause, she said. It's the most useful sound there is, and it never gets the credit.