Botanical tattoo of a swirling vine with small red flowers and three silhouetted birds on a branch, running down the calf.

Vine and birds tattoo on a calf

Botanical · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A leg with a tattoo of a curling vine that climbs up the calf and trails down towards the ankle. Three dark silhouetted birds perch on a curved branch, and small red flowers with green leaves sit among the scrolls. The linework is smooth and grey-toned with solid black birds, and the composition follows the natural curve of the leg.

Botanical Calf Vine Flower Bird Branch Swirl Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dorota swept the customs hut every morning, and every morning she found another curl of vine on the step where it had pushed under the door. The thing had come up the north wall the summer the river flooded, a green thread nobody had planted, and by October it had reached the sill of the window where Mateus stamped the passports. His superior wanted it cut back to the stone. Dorota told him that a vine growing on a border was a sign somebody meant to stay.

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The birds arrived at dusk, three of them, always onto the same curved branch that hung over the sill. Mateus started a tally in the back of the ledger, one mark for each evening, and by the first frost there were eighty-one marks and not one of them had been a two or a four. Dorota said the birds were counting the people crossing, and she laughed when he failed to find that funny.

In November an inspector came from the capital with a clipboard and a grievance. He stood in the yard in a good coat and looked at the vine for a long time, then at the birds, then at Mateus's ledger. "Three," he said, and wrote it on his form as though it were a fault in the paperwork. Mateus said nothing. That evening, for the first time, the birds did not come to the branch at all. They rose together over the frozen reeds and went east, towards the water and the country nobody on this side had been allowed to see for years.

Morning brought the frost, and the vine's last red flowers stayed open against the glass. Mateus drew one line under the eighty-one marks and left the next line empty.