Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bird and profile on a thigh

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a woman's profile in fine black outline with the hair rendered as a dense mass of curling, bubble-like circles in grey shading. A small bird with orange, yellow and teal watercolour-style colour sits on top of the hair, with teal wash trailing beneath the profile. The image shows three side-by-side views of the same thigh, with the black and grey shading dominating and the colour concentrated in the bird and the teal accents.

Upper arm Woman Profile Bird Hair Bubble

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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

Sit closer, you lot, the fire's only warm on this side. My grandmother knew the woman in this story, or said she did, and she never once told it the same way twice, so take what you're given.

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Her name was Ada Penhallow, and she washed the fishermen's wool on the slipway below Mariner's Row, where the water came in green and went out brown. Her hair was a great dark cloud of curls, and it held bubbles the way a wave holds foam, a hundred little rounds of soap that never burst while she worked. Gulls would come down to look at her, then think better of it.

One March a bird came to the slipway that nobody could name. It had a breast the colour of marigolds, a tail like a sliver of sea glass, and it would not leave. Ada gave it crumbs from her pie tin. It sat on the crown of her hair as if it had been looking for a nest all its life, and after that the bubbles in her curls caught the same teal as its wing every morning the sun came up over the breakwater.

The harbour master said a bird that stays is bad luck. Ada said the sea had sent it, and she was not one to argue with the sea. When the boats went out in April and did not come back for three days, she sang the bird's song down to the water, and on the third morning the boats came round the point with their sails the colour of new bread. The bird was gone by then. Nobody saw it leave. Ask the slipway on a still night and you'll still see the bubbles rising off the water, one at a time, teal and gold.