Sketchy black and grey tattoo on a calf showing a woman's face framed by two birds and poppy flowers, with peach and teal accents.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman's face with birds and poppies on a calf

Botanical · Calf · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a woman's face and shoulders, with two songbirds perched above her head among large poppy flowers. Fine, loose black linework and grey shading create a sketched look, with splashes of ink around the top of the design. Peach blush on the cheek, yellow petals and a teal mandala near the neck add colour against the grey, and the design wraps up the lower leg.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The king of Pell Harrow had stopped sleeping, and so the palace stopped too. Nobody sang in the kitchens. The bells in the north tower were wrapped in cloth so they would not wake him. It was Marit, the scullery girl, who noticed that the sparrows still came to the sill each morning and sat there complaining until someone fed them.

Keep reading

She saved crumbs in her apron for a month. Then one dawn she found poppies had come up through the cracks between the courtyard flags, red and papery, where no seed had ever been sown. She picked three and pushed them into her hair. The sparrows came down and perched on her head as though she were a branch. The steward saw it and dragged her before the king in disgrace.

The king did not shout. He looked at her a long while and asked what the birds were saying. Marit told him they were saying he should open the shutters. He said the shutters had been nailed shut since his wife died. She said the birds had found a way in regardless. He had the nails pulled out, and the dark night slid back from the window like a cloak, and grey light came over the mountains.

Below in the tower, someone who had been waiting for the signal pulled the cloth from the great bell. It rang once, clumsily, and the sparrows lifted off the girl's head all together and went to sit on the sill.

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