Realistic colour tattoo of a flock of black birds over a pink and purple sunset, with a wrecked ship in waves and a cliff, across a person's upper back and side.

Bird flock and sunset sea scene on a back

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

A flock of black birds rises from the shoulder and sweeps down across the back in a swirling column. Below them, a sunset sky in pink, orange and violet sits above a rocky cliff and a tilted ship breaking through rolling teal waves. The birds are in soft black shading while the sky and sea use smooth blended colour, and the composition runs diagonally from the top shoulder down the side.

Realism Back Bird Flock Sunset Sky Cloud Ship Sea Wave

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

Sit closer, you lot, the wind off the water gets into old bones and young ears too. No, Tamsin, the gulls don't count. I mean the ship. Ever since the water came up over the old town, every grandmother on this shingle has told the tale of the ship, and every one of them has got the wreck wrong.

Keep reading

Her name was the Marigold Tern, and she came round the headland at evening with her sails the colour of rust and the sun sinking behind her like a dropped coin. The crew had been at sea nine weeks. They could smell the chalk of the cliffs before they could see it, and they were singing, which is the one thing sailors do that the sea never forgives.

Then the swell took her side on. Nobody on the shore could have stopped it. What I know, I know from the woman who stood on the rocks that night with a lantern, and she swore the birds came up off the water before the timber cracked. Thousands of them, black as ink poured from a bottle, rising from the bow and turning in one great column, as if they meant to carry the ship's last breath up to the sky themselves.

And here is the part you will not believe. At first light the crew were found alive on the ledge, wet and blue-lipped, every one of them counting birds. Forty-one, the woman said. Each man swore to a different number. So the sea took the ship, but it never got to keep the count. Now off you go home before the tide turns.