Watercolour-style tattoo of a songbird with black linework, outlined stars and a small heart on the inner forearm.

Watercolour bird and stars on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A songbird is shown in profile with loose black linework and washes of red, orange, yellow, green and blue. Splatter dots, a dotted beaded line, faint scribbled marks and outlined stars run across the forearm around it. The ink is saturated in places and fades into the skin in others, and the photo is taken against a red brick wall.

Forearm Bird Star Heart Bead Splatter Watercolour Linework Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the last week of August the Bramley trees were dropping their weight onto the grass faster than we could gather it, and the blackbird had taken to sitting on the wheelbarrow handle as if it had been hired. Gran said it was after worms. I said it was after me, and she told me not to be soft.

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The trouble started with the string of glass beads Mum had left hanging on the gatepost, blue and clear, the kind she wore to church before she stopped going. I went to fetch them at dusk and found them gone, and a scatter of beads in the grass under the hawthorn, each one set down in a line like a path. Two were missing. I knelt there a long time, pressing my palm flat through the clover until the dew soaked my knees.

On the third morning there was a star chalked on the gatepost, five points, and a smaller one beside it, and then a trail of them leading down the rows toward the old cider press. The bird sat on the press with a bead in its beak. When I stepped closer it dropped the bead into my open hand, warm as a boiled sweet, and flew low over the pears toward the road.

Gran laughed until she had to sit on the tailgate when I showed her. "Your grandfather did the same with my ribbon the summer we met," she said, and nothing more. She just picked the next apple and dropped it in my bucket. The bead sits on my windowsill now, and in the afternoons the light comes through it orange and throws a small bird-shaped stain across the sill.