Split photo: on the left, a small dark tattoo on a hip; on the right, a colour traditional bird with a purple flower and green leaves on a thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Before and after: small mark and coloured bird on thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

The left panel shows a small, simple dark tattoo on the hip or buttock, partly covered by white lace underwear, and the right panel shows a larger coloured design. The right tattoo depicts a blue bird with spread wings, a purple five-petalled flower with a yellow centre, and green leaves, with bold black outlines and soft red and pink shading behind the bird. The composition is a two-panel before and after collage, with the close crops focusing on the skin.

Traditional Thigh Bird Dove Flower Leaves Before and after

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have carried the same kind of message for eleven winters: folded small enough to sit under one wing, always about weather, tides and boats not yet home. Orrel is a kingdom of salt and stairs, and every dawn the royal dovecote opens and sends you down the cliff path to the harbour, where the fishwives wait with their baskets and their questions. Nobody reads the notes aloud. Nobody asks you anything.

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This morning the paper is folded around a pressed flower, purple with a yellow eye, its stem bound in green thread. The Chamberlain says it is for Marta Sallow, whose husband went out before the squall and did not come back. No one in Orrel has ever sent flowers to the sea-wall widows. You take the stem gently in your beak and fly low over the reeds while the sky behind the cliffs turns the colour of a cut that is beginning to close.

Marta is mending nets on the quay when you land. She looks at the flower, then at the thread, then at you, and says the king's birds have only ever brought bad news. You step closer and wait. At last she unfolds the paper and reads the line written inside in the king's cramped hand: Your husband rowed me out of the reef in the year of the great flood, and I have owed him every day since.

She ties the stem to a net float and tosses it into the tide, where it bobs out past the breakwater, purple against the grey. You watch until it is only a fleck. Then you turn for the cliffs with nothing in your beak for the first time in eleven winters, and the wind, for once, is in no hurry to carry you home.