Colour tattoo of two songbirds perched among blackberry branches across the upper abdomen, in a neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two songbirds and blackberries across the stomach

Neo-trad · Other · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a yellow-green songbird on the left facing a grey, black and white striped songbird on the right, with dark blackberry clusters and thorny branches between and around them. The linework is bold and dark, with smooth shading on the feathers and soft green wash behind the birds. Colour is applied in yellow, olive, orange and grey, and the composition spreads horizontally across the upper abdomen beneath the bust.

Neo-trad Botanical Other Bird Songbird Blackberry Branches Thorn Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brambles along the railway cutting were late that year, so Marjorie and I did not speak until the second week of September. We had fallen out over the harvest dance and over what she had said about Dennis Hale's new motorbike, and for three weeks we kept to opposite sides of the lane with our baskets. Then I came round the bend by the signal box and found her already at the thicket, reaching past the thorns with her sleeves pulled down over her wrists.

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Two birds were working the hedge above her, a little olive one with a yellow breast and a striped grey one that flicked its tail as though it was cross with the pair of us. Dad said they were warblers come down from the hills for the fruit. I said nothing. Marjorie said the grey one was a bossy old thing and the yellow one a fool for following it about. We went on picking, the baskets filling slowly, and neither of us looked up.

By four o'clock my fingers were purple to the knuckle and the pail was nearly full. The last cluster hung low over the rails, fat and shining and crawling with ants, and it was plain neither of us would reach it first without the other. Marjorie held back the branch and I took the fruit. The birds dropped into the hawthorn beside us, close enough to hear the small click of their wings.

She pressed a berry into my palm, still warm from the sun, and I ate it, and the juice ran down my wrist and into my cuff. We did not say sorry. We did not need to. When the Bristol train came round the cutting the two birds lifted together and went down the line, one behind the other, as if the grey one had finally decided to let the yellow one follow.