Colour traditional tattoo of a wren perched on a branch with green leaves and pink blossoms, on a person's back.

Wren on a blossom branch with pink flowers

Traditional · Back · Colour · Photo

A small brown and rust wren with a pale breast perches on a brown branch, with a pink blossom above its wing and a larger pink flower with dark centres below. Bold black outlines define the bird and foliage, while the feathers use layered brown, orange and grey shading. Green leaves frame the bird against the skin, and the composition sits diagonally across the image.

Traditional Botanical Back Bird Branch Blossom Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell found the wren in the coconut shy, tangled in a length of pink ribbon that had blown off the candyfloss stall. It was no bigger than her thumb, and it had stopped struggling by the time she knelt in the sawdust. Abel Quick, who owned the shy and most of the rest of the fair, came round the side of the booth with his hands in his waistcoat pockets.

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"King of birds," he said, as if she had asked. "Hid in the eagle's feathers, so the story goes, and flew higher than the eagle when the eagle couldn't go another yard." He had a brass cage hanging from the booth post, the kind people kept canaries in, and he had been charging a penny a look at the thing inside all week. Nell had seen the cage empty that morning. She had not seen the bird go in.

She unhooked the ribbon one loop at a time while Abel talked about the price of paraffin. When the wren was free it sat on her knuckle, then on the rim of the cage, then flew straight up past the big wheel and into the hawthorn hedge, which still had late pink blossom on it though it was October. Abel said nothing. He only looked at the hedge the way a man looks at a debt he has decided not to collect.

The fair was gone by morning, wagons and horses and the sad yellow lamps over the shy, and the field was only a field. Nell found the brass cage hanging empty from a hawthorn twig at the gate. Tucked through its little door was one pink blossom, fresh as paint, and she kept it in her coat pocket until it was the only thing left of that summer.