Fine line tattoo of a black outlined bird beside a blank circle, under an arc of coloured raindrops, on a forearm.

Bird under coloured raindrops on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a black line drawing of a bird with a long beak beside a large blank circle with a spiky outline. Solid teardrop shapes in pink, green, blue, orange and yellow fall in an arc above and around the figure. The thin black linework contrasts with the coloured drops, and the photo is taken at a slight angle under warm indoor light.

Fine line Forearm Bird Raindrop Sun Rain Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had come back to Carrow Keep the week the bird arrived, and it fell in colours nobody in the valley could explain. I was the only one who climbed the spiral stair to the roofless hall to check the gutters, so I was the first to see the long-beaked thing standing on the flagstones, its back hunched against a drizzle of pink and green and blue drops that fell straight down through the empty arch.

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It would not leave. Each morning I carried up a flask of tea and found it in the same place, facing the blank patch of sky where the sun used to hang before the roof came down. Old Mrs Aske from the village said the keep had once had a round window of yellow glass, and that the glass broke on the night the lord's daughter walked out to meet the tide. I told her that was nonsense, then wrote it in the ledger anyway, underneath the rainfall.

On the ninth day I stopped trying to shoo the bird away. I sat on the low wall and waited while the drops thickened until the air tasted of paint and wet stone. The bird lifted its head and pointed its beak at the circle of nothing above, as though it were waiting for someone to fill it in. Then it tucked its legs under itself and settled, and the rain thinned to a single orange drop that hung from the broken lip of the arch.

I still don't know whether the sun came back. What I know is that in the spring the moss on the north wall grew in a perfect round, pale as a plate, and the bird was gone. I have never since looked up without expecting a colour to fall.