Black and grey Japanese style arm sleeve tattoo with a bird, swirling clouds and pink lotus flowers across the shoulder, upper arm and forearm.

Bird and flower full arm sleeve

Japanese · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A full sleeve tattoo covers the arm from the shoulder to below the elbow, showing a large bird with wings and long flowing tail feathers among swirling cloud and wave motifs. The linework is fine and the shading is smooth and soft, with dark outlines and grey gradients. Small pink lotus-style flowers add the only colour against the predominantly grey tones.

Japanese Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Forearm Bird Wing Feather Cloud Swirl Wave Flower Lotus Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hold the lantern up and mind the step, because the fog came in that night the way it does off the Skerry bank, thick enough to lean on. Old Henning's boat was the last of the Marra fleet to clear the breakwater, and nobody liked it, least of all his nephew Ays, who was sixteen and had been promised the wheel for once.

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When the swell turned, the water went pale in patches, the way it does before a breaking sea, and out of the foam a bird came up. It was grey as the sky and the sea were that night, but its tail streamed behind it in long curls like smoke off a snuffed candle, and where its feet touched the water, pink flowers opened on the waves as if someone had flung petals onto the dark. Ays swore he saw its eye turn toward the boat. Henning only crossed himself and kept his hands on the tiller.

The bird went ahead of them for three hours, calling low through the murk, and every time the crew lost the line of it, the fog would thin for a moment and there it would be, wings lifted over the swell. The old sea-wives say such birds come for the drowned, and Ays, shivering at the bow, asked his uncle why it hadn't taken them. Henning took a long time to answer. 'Because there was a lamp lit on the harbour wall,' he said, 'and it wanted the lamp answered, not the boat.'

They came in past the wall at first light. The bird rose over the stones, curled once in the cloud, and was gone. On the deck at Ays's feet lay a single pink petal, still warm, and he kept it in his oilskin pocket for the rest of his life.