Colour realism tattoo of a brown songbird on a grey branch, with peach flowers and green leaves, on the outer forearm.

Bird on a branch with peach flowers on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A small songbird perches on a thin grey branch, with two large peach-coloured flowers and green leaves filling the background along the forearm. The bird and flowers are shaded with soft gradients that blend into a warm orange wash behind them, giving a painterly, watercolour-like effect. The design wraps vertically around the arm, with the bird near the centre and the flowers above and below it.

Realism Botanical Forearm Bird Songbird Branch Flower 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

Dad carried the cage down the lane on Sunday like it was the Sacrament, the cloth over it and the little brass hook catching the light. Mr Pascoe at the pit head had told him the birds were for the men who went under, and the men laughed, but Dad didn't. Our canary was called Nell, after nobody in particular, and she sang at the window every morning before the hooter.

Keep reading

The peach tree in Mrs Hollis's yard had come into flower that April, pink-gold and loud with bees, and I used to stand on the wall to look at it while Nell sang. One week, when the strike was on and Dad had nothing to do but sit by the range, I took a sprig of it home in a jam jar. He turned the jar in his hands as if it might tell him something he didn't already know.

On the Thursday Nell stopped singing at half four. Dad saw it first, the cloth pulled back and her perch quiet, and he was out of the door before the shift horn went. They got the lads up from the low level with the headgear still standing, and Mr Pascoe shook Dad's hand in the lamp room as though it were a sermon.

Nell lived until the autumn. I still have the jar, with the peach sprig gone brown and papery in the bottom. When the sun comes over Mrs Hollis's wall in May I stand where I used to stand and watch the blossom open, bright as anything, and listen for a bird I can't hear.