Woman seen from behind with a grey and teal bird and pink flowers with green leaves tattooed on her upper back, in a gold sequin dress.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bird and flowers on upper back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A dark grey and teal bird with spread wings sits near the upper back and shoulder blade, with a branch of pink and mauve flowers and green leaves running down beside the spine. The linework is solid with soft shading in the bird and blended tones in the petals. The muted colours sit against a bare back, with the gold sequin dress and a softly blurred stone wall behind.

Botanical Traditional Back Bird Flower Leaves Branch Spine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have been told twice not to touch the cabin side until the lock gates at Haddon are open, but the light is good and the boat is idle, so you prise the lid off the teal tin and stir it with a bent nail until the colour settles. Your uncle Ned wants the old rose and castle pattern his mother used to paint, the one every working boat on the cut carries. You want a bird. Nobody has painted a bird on a boat in forty years, and Ned says birds are bad luck on the water because they always leave.

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You paint it anyway, late, with the hull knocking gently against the bank. The wings go on first, spread wide over the cabin door, each feather done in three strokes, dark at the root and paler at the tip. Below it you run a branch of sweet peas down the panel beside the window, mauve and pink, the leaves so green they look wet. On every petal you dab a little white on the side away from the bank, so the light seems to come off the river.

Ned comes back at dusk with the lock fee in his pocket and stops on the towpath. He says nothing for a long while. Then he tells you the bird faces the wrong way, that it should face upstream toward the town where his mother was born, so the boat always looks back. You tell him the bird is leaving, and that is the whole point of it. He laughs, the first time in a week, and hands you the brush.

In the morning the boat slides through the gates with the sun coming up behind it. The bird sits on the wood ahead of you, wings open, facing the way the water goes. Ned lights the stove and sets the kettle on, and you do not look back at the lock.