Two black and grey dotwork tattoos of songbirds on a branch, one with a raspberry and one with leaves, on a pair of forearms.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two songbirds on branches, forearms

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two songbirds are shown on separate forearms, one perched on a twig beside a raspberry and the other on a branch with leaves. The birds are built from fine dots and stippling, with denser shading along the wings, tails and undersides. The image is in black and grey, with the two pieces mirrored in composition against a dark background.

Dotwork Botanical Forearm Bird Songbird Branch Twig Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The band at the Ritz has already packed away the drums when you find the bird on the cloakroom ledge, a grey mimic with a smear of raspberry juice on its beak. Its tail is longer than the rest of it put together, and it is copying the bandleader's cough so exactly that you laugh out loud. Nobody claims it. Your mother used to say a bird that copies can't be trusted with secrets, which is why you've always kept your own.

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Eddie Marsh, who sweeps the floor and still owes you two shillings, says it came in on the shoulder of a woman in a green coat. She danced one slow foxtrot with a stranger by the coat rack, then went out through the fire door without her gloves. The bird hopped down the staircase after her, one step at a time, as if it had a ticket. You carry it out past the bins to the hedge at the back of the car park, where the blackberry canes are thick and the wrens are already scolding in the dark.

You set it on a twig, and from somewhere in the hedge a wren answers with three falling notes, the tune the band played for the last waltz. The mimic lifts its head and sings it back, slightly wrong, the way the saxophone always was. It has been listening all night: the cough, the laughter, the names called across the floor.

At the gate, the woman in green stands with her gloves in one hand, not looking back. You open your fingers, and the bird goes up into the hedge without a sound, leaving you holding nothing but the taste of the evening.