Black ink bird with feathers and roses on the side ribs, with flowing script tattooed on the thigh, in a black and white photo with a patterned yellow bikini.

Bird and roses on ribs, script on thigh

Botanical · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A black line tattoo of a bird with feathered wings and layered roses covers the side of the torso, with a small green-tinted bird head near the top. Below, on the thigh, sweeping calligraphic script and loops run down the leg. The photograph is black and white apart from the yellow and pink floral bikini bottoms and the lace top, which draw the eye to the body.

Botanical Lettering Ribs Thigh Bird Feather Rose Flower Script Calligraphy Swirl

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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

The telegraph office had shut in March, so Edith Pardoe kept her wire hand in the back parlour of Seaview House, looping capitals across the blotter while the gulls fought over the bins outside. Mrs Cole, who ran the boarding house with a ledger and a temper, allowed it on the condition that the ink stayed off the antimacassars.

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The letters came from the lighthouse at Scarrow Point, where a keeper called Tobias Wren wrote every Friday to a woman in Leeds who never replied. Edith copied each one onto thin paper, rolled it tight and gave it to Winifred, a grey pigeon with a wing like a torn fan, who had flown between the point and the boarding house since before the war. Winifred had a habit of pausing on the rose trellis by the back gate, where the old red blooms still opened every June despite the salt, as if she were reading the petals.

On the morning of the great gale Tobias sent no letter. Instead came a single line scratched on a slate and sent up on the rocket line: the lamp was failing and the rota was wrong. Edith wrote the reply in her tightest script, each stroke a rope, and tied it to the bird's leg with a yellow ribbon torn from Mrs Cole's second-best bonnet. Winifred went up into the wind and did not come back for an hour.

When she did, she landed on the trellis with her feathers plastered flat and a fresh message under one wing, in a hand Edith did not know, careful and unhurried. The lamp was lit. Edith read it twice, then slid the paper beneath the blotter, where the ink from a hundred loops had already bled through to the wood.