Colour tattoo of a small teal and red bird with a red sun and branches on the inner forearm, in a loose neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bird and sun on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A small songbird with teal wings sits beneath a red and orange sun, with thin dark branches and leaves extending above and below it. The linework is dark and fairly light, with soft watercolour-like fills in red, orange and teal. The tattoo sits on the forearm against a plain white shirt and a pale wall, with a matching print of the same design visible behind.

Neo-trad Forearm Bird Sun Branches Leaves Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mist still lay in the hollows when Ilse Varga hauled the bolted gate open at Harrow Col, and the swallow was already waiting on the post, teal wings folded, as if someone had told it to be punctual. Her father had said the bird belonged to the refuge the way the stove and the bell did. Nobody in the valley had ever seen it leave.

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That autumn the snow came early and the pass filled faster than the men could dig. Three carters were stranded at the lower hut, and the only light visible through the white was the red sun her father had daubed on the shutter years before, its colour gone to rust. Ilse climbed to the ridge with a coil of rope and a tin of lamp oil, and the bird went ahead of her, dipping low, then rising, its thin dark twigs catching the wind.

At the ridge the wind pushed her sideways and she lost the path twice. Each time the bird waited on a boulder, wings half open, until she found the stones again. She reached the lower hut at dusk, lit the shutter lamp so its red glow spread across the drifts, and counted heads until the carters' mules came stumbling out of the grey.

Afterwards the men said the bird had guided them down. Ilse only said it had been a good lamp. In spring she found the post empty, but a single teal feather lay on the windowsill of the refuge, and she pressed it between the pages of her father's weather book, where it stayed.