Colour neo-trad tattoo of a red and grey bird perched on a branch beside a teal medallion of pink roses, shown on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bird and roses on a branch

Neo-trad · Colour · Photo

A red-headed bird with grey and blue-grey wings perches on a thin branch, with a large round teal and cream medallion of pink five-petalled roses behind it. The bird is rendered with bold dark outlines and smooth shading, while the medallion has a flatter, more graphic finish. Strong reds, pinks, teals and greens dominate the composition, and the body area is not clearly visible.

Neo-trad Traditional Bird Branch Rose Flower Medallion 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 finch came with the roses. Ada Pell's father traded a sack of bulbs for it at Maidstone market in the spring of 1911, a cock bird with a head the colour of a pillar box and wings like wet slate, and he kept it in a wire cage on the potting shed sill until it learned to sing over the rasp of the secateurs.

Keep reading

The nursery's pride was a pink five-petalled rose that Pell had spent eleven years coaxing out of the hedgerow stock. He painted its likeness on a teal-glazed plate and hung the plate by the greenhouse door, where the cream rim caught the early light. Every morning Ada pinned a fresh spray to its edge, and every morning the bird hopped down from its perch to inspect her work, tilting its head as if she had put a petal in the wrong place.

The winter the hedgerow frosted black, the grafts failed one after another. Her father stopped coming out to the shed. Ada sat with the cage on her knees beside the stove, and on the last night of January she carried it out to the frozen beds and opened the little door.

The bird did not go up into the sky. It landed on the bare stem of the one rose still green against the wall, shook out its slate wings, and sang the same three notes it had sung over the secateurs. By dawn that stem had put out a single pale bud. Her father came out in his coat, saw it, and said nothing, which for him was as near to forgiveness as he came, and the plate went back on its nail.