Colour tattoo of a small orange bird perched on a branch with peach blossoms and green leaves, across the inner forearm.

Bird and blossom on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a small orange and brown bird perched on a dark branch, with two large peach blossoms and green leaves around it. The bird and flowers are rendered with soft, fine shading and a painterly, watercolour-like wash. The warm peach and orange tones dominate the design, and the motif runs vertically along the forearm.

Botanical Realism Forearm Bird Branch Blossom Flower Leaves

Find an artist for this

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

The tower stair has lost three steps since the autumn, so you take the last flight on your hands as much as your feet, counting the loose stones under your boots. At the top there is no roof, only a square of sky framed by the broken parapet, and in one corner a quince has forced its way up through the mortar. Nobody planted it. The estate papers from 1790 mention a garden wall on the far side of the moat, but this tree grew out of the castle itself, its roots threaded between the blocks like wire through old cloth.

Keep reading

Mrs Acland, who kept the gate lodge before you, told you the redstart came every April. She said it was the same bird, though nobody could prove that and she had never tried to. It sat on the lowest bough, flicked its orange tail at the cattle below, and sang as if the tower were still roofed and someone was listening from the hall.

This spring you come up with a heel of bread in your coat pocket and nothing else. The blossom is already open, two pale cups the colour of the inside of a shell, and the bird is there, tilting its head at you as if you are late. You crumble the bread on the stone. It does not eat. It watches you, then the bough, then you again, and you understand that it is waiting for you to take the branch, which is not yours to take.

So you leave the bread where it falls and go down the stair one step at a time, counting. When you reach the bottom the gate lodge light is on, and above you a small orange shape moves against the sky.